When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI for a recommendation, the answer it gives depends less on your website than on how often, and how well, other people have talked about your business.
A growing share of local searches now happen inside an AI answer, not a list of blue links.
Today, when someone asks ChatGPT for a good accountant in Manchester, or asks Google’s AI Overview to compare removal firms, they get a short, confident answer with two or three businesses named.
If you get left out of that answer often enough, it starts to matter to the pipeline the same way a poor Google ranking used to.
The instinct is to treat this like SEO: tweak the website, add some keywords, tick a technical box. The evidence says that’s not where the answer comes from.
The research says reputation, not tactics
Charlie Oscar, a marketing agency, ran a regression analysis across 30 brands in six categories to separate what actually drives AI visibility from what merely correlates with it.
They found that 63% of it comes from long-term brand equity, the accumulated effect of a business having been reviewed, written about and searched for over years.
Another 22% comes from total marketing spend. Citation-building activity, the specific tactics most “AI search optimisation” advice focuses on, accounts for 11%.
A separate Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands backs this up from a different angle, and its full ranking is worth setting out because of what it rules out.
- Branded web mentions (how often a business gets talked about by name across the web) correlate with AI visibility at 0.664.
- Brand-name anchor text on other sites sits at 0.527.
- Branded search volume, people typing your company name into Google, comes in third at 0.392.
- Backlinks, the traditional SEO currency, manage only 0.218.
- Paid advertising does worse still: branded ad traffic and ad spend both sit around 0.216, barely different from doing nothing.
Ahrefs’ own conclusion was that “Ads won’t save you if you want AI Overview visibility.” Buying visibility doesn’t work here the way it does in paid search.
What “being mentioned” actually means
Whitespark’s 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report, a survey of 47 named local search experts scoring 187 separate factors, put a name to the five highest-scoring factors for AI search visibility specifically.
Their findings, In order, were:
- A listing on expert-curated “best of” and similar sites
- A dedicated page for each service a business offers
- Prominence on domains relevant to the industry
- The quality of unstructured citations such as press coverage and association or government listings
- The authority of the third-party sites carrying a business’s reviews.
Four of those five are about how other people and other websites talk about a business, not what the business says about itself.
As the report’s author, Darren Shaw, puts it: “mentions are the new link.” A business’s own website still matters, mainly as the place a dedicated service page needs to exist, but it’s no longer the main lever.
For a Manchester business, that points somewhere practical: press coverage in trade and regional publications, a spot on genuine “best of” and comparison lists, and reviews on the platforms your customers actually use all carry more weight for AI visibility than another round of website tweaks.
It’s closer to traditional PR and reputation-building than it is to search engine optimisation, and it rewards the same things a good local reputation always has: turning up in the places your customers and peers already trust.
Why this is worth acting on now, not later
The size of the prize is moving fast. Adobe’s own analysis of AI-referred traffic found it converting 38% worse than other channels in March 2025.
By March 2026, the same traffic was converting 42% better. That’s a reversal within about a year, not a slow drift, and it suggests that customers arriving via an AI recommendation are increasingly further along and more ready to buy than customers arriving any other way.
A channel moving that quickly is one worth having a presence in before it settles, not after.
The catch
None of this happens quickly. Brand equity is described as “long-term” for a reason, and 63% of an outcome being explained by years of accumulated reputation is not something a single campaign fixes.
The businesses showing up reliably in AI answers today are mostly the ones that were already well regarded before anyone started talking about AI search.
That’s a reason to start building the reputation now, not a reason to expect a shortcut later. The good news is that the work itself isn’t exotic. It’s press coverage, credible listings, and reviews on the sites that matter, kept up over time, not as a one-off push.
This article was written by Simon Theakston who runs Digital Drift, an AI search consultancy for B2B agencies and consultancies. You can check whether your own business already shows up in AI search results at digitaldrifthq.com.
