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What is AI search?
More and more customers ask an AI assistant instead of searching. The assistant answers with a few business names, not a page of links. This page explains how those answers are made, why some businesses get named and some do not, and what you can honestly do about it.
What changed
For twenty years, finding a plumber meant a page of ten blue links, and you picked one. Now a customer can type "who is the best plumber near me" into ChatGPT, or see an AI answer box above their Google results, and get one written answer instead: two or three names, with a sentence about each. Most people never look past it.
That is AI search. The list of links became a short written answer, and being in the answer took over the job that being on page one used to do.
Here is what such an answer looks like. The business is made up; the shape is what the assistants really produce.
Who are the best dentists in Bristol?
Bristol has a lot of well reviewed practices, so "best" depends on what you need. For general and family dentistry, the ones that come up most often are Queen Square Dental Practice (city centre, strong reviews for check ups and hygiene), Clifton Smile Dental (Clifton, popular for cosmetic work) and Redland Dental Practice (family run, praised for nervous patients).
Three businesses got picked. Every other dentist in Bristol did not. Nobody sent them a letter about it.
Who gives these answers
The assistants people actually use for this today are ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, where AI Overviews is the answer box above Google results. Those are the 3 assistants a free PicksYou check asks. Others exist: Gemini, Grok and Claude answer the same kinds of questions, and Microsoft Copilot has no proper way for anyone to measure it yet. The full list, with what we ask and how, is on our methodology page.
How an answer is made
An assistant does not keep a directory of businesses with your entry in it. When the question is local and current, it runs a live web search, reads a handful of pages, and writes a fresh answer from what it just read. The pages it tends to read are ordinary ones: "best plumbers in your town" articles, review sites, maps listings, and your own website.
Because the answer is written fresh each time, it changes. Two people asking the same question on the same day can get different names. That matters for how you measure it, and we come back to it below.
Why a business gets named, or does not
From reading sampled answers every week, the pattern is not mysterious. Assistants name businesses they can find and read about on the pages they search. In practice, a few things keep coming up:
- The local "best of" pages. Assistants pull names from these pages before anywhere else. If "best dentists in Bristol" articles do not list you, the assistant reading them has no reason to.
- Reviews. The businesses that get named tend to have a well reviewed, findable listing. The written answers often quote review language straight back: "strong reviews for check ups".
- A website an assistant can read. If your homepage carries your name, address and phone number in a form software can read without guessing, an assistant knows who the page belongs to. If your site blocks AI crawlers, some assistants cannot read it at all.
- Being in the index the assistant searches. ChatGPT's search reads Bing's index of the web, for example. A site with no pages in that index is invisible to it, however good the site is.
None of these is a secret trick. They are the boring, checkable conditions for being readable, and a check measures each one for your business.
What you can honestly do
Everything on the list above can be worked on: ask the best-of pages how to get added, earn and answer reviews, put readable business details on your homepage, let the AI crawlers in. A PicksYou report lists which of these are in your way, with what to do about each.
What you cannot do is buy the answer. Anyone who sells you a position in an AI answer is selling a number they invented. There is no list inside ChatGPT to be number three of. There is one answer, written fresh, that either mentions you or does not. Fixing the conditions above makes you readable; the answer stays the assistant's.
How to know where you stand
Because answers vary, one screenshot proves nothing, good or bad. The honest way to measure is the boring one: ask the questions a real customer would ask, several of them, across the assistants, and count how many answers named you. Then do it again next week, because a count from one day moves by luck alone.
That is what PicksYou does: 5 questions to 3 assistants, 15 answers back, every answer word for word with your name marked where it appears. How every number is made, and what one check can and cannot tell you, is public: How we measure.