What Is AI Search and Does Your Derby Business Show Up?

People are starting to ask ChatGPT for recommendations the way they used to ask Google. Best plumber near me. Good accountant in Derby. A web designer who won't charge the earth. This isn't a niche behaviour anymore. A study covered by Search Engine Land found that 37% of consumers now start their searches with an AI tool instead of Google, and if your business has never been checked against that shift, there's a good chance you're invisible to it.

How AI search actually works

Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini crawl and index the web using their own bots, completely separately from Google. When someone asks one of them a question, it isn't pulling from Google's search index. It's reading a version of the web it has built itself, then summarising an answer directly, often without showing any links at all.

This means ranking well on Google tells you nothing about how you're doing here. A site can sit on page one of Google and still be almost completely invisible to ChatGPT, usually because of something small and technical that nobody ever checked, because it never affected the Google ranking in the first place. Most businesses have done precisely nothing about this layer, simply because it's new enough that it hasn't made its way onto anyone's checklist yet.

The three things that determine whether you show up

The first is whether AI tools can actually read your site at all. They crawl the web using their own bots, and if your site blocks those bots, even by accident, you're invisible no matter how good your content is.

The second is whether the site makes it easy for AI to understand what your business actually does. Structured data describes things like your name, location and services in a format machines can read directly, rather than leaving an AI tool to guess by scanning your homepage.

The third is whether there's a file pointing AI tools towards the pages that matter most. This is a newer file called llms.txt, and it works a bit like the robots.txt file search engines have used for decades, but aimed at AI crawlers instead.

What happens if you're invisible to AI

This isn't theoretical. We recently worked with a Derby accountancy firm whose website builder had automatically switched on a setting that blocked every major AI crawler from reading the site, without them ever choosing it or knowing it was there. It's a standard function on some platforms, so it's easy to have it on without realising.

The practical effect was that when someone asked an AI tool for an accountant in Derby, this business simply couldn't appear, and competitors who happened to have that setting switched off were the ones getting recommended instead. Once we identified and fixed it, traffic started a steady climb. The first month alone saw a 6% increase. AI visibility and SEO both compound over time, so a fix like this tends to keep paying off well beyond the first month.

What to do about it

The reassuring part is that none of this requires rebuilding your site or rewriting your content. In most cases it's a handful of small technical fixes, the kind of thing that can be sorted within days rather than weeks. It also isn't an expensive job, because you're only paying to fix what's actually broken, not for a big overhaul you don't need.

If you want to know exactly where your own site stands, we run a full AI visibility check with one fixed price, confirmed before any work starts.

It's a small check that could be the difference between showing up and being skipped entirely.