How to get your small business into Gen-AI results

Small business needs to move beyond search engine results pages and social media for generating leads. Now that 49 per cent of the Australian population are using generative AI, it is time for small businesses to make sure that they appear in generative AI results.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI)

Whilst your business may have postponed implementing artificial intelligence AI tools within your systems and processes, you and your customers are probably using Generative AI tools on a semi-regular basis.

You may have heard of:

ChatGPT
Claude
Google Gemini
Microsoft Copilot
Perplexity

These tools allow you to enter prompts and generate answers and re-generate answers if you would like more information.

Target audience behaviour

If your target audience already knows about you, then they are likely to use an online search tool (like Google or Bing) to find you. You will appear in search results if you have optimised your online presence, the search robots have found your content and the algorithms have added your content to their database.

If your target audience has a favourite social media platform where they doom scroll or micro-learn on a regular basis, if your audience needs a product or service, they may search within the social media platform first. If you don’t have a quality presence there, they probably won’t find you.

If your target audience decides to start their search on Gen-AI, your business needs to be in their dataset. This content is mostly scraped from websites. This includes your own website and where you are mentioned on other websites. All of this content will be processed by machine learning, natural language processing and large language models so you need to increase your probability of being found by publishing more content, more often on the best websites.

Places to publish quality content

Which website locations will help you appear in the most Gen-AI results?

Your own website (the only content on the internet that you own). Make sure you add content here regularly, ideally in a categorised blog
High Domain Authority websites – media, government, educational, large corporates etc. Essentially, websites with extensive quality content
Major directory listings – Google Business, Bingplaces, Professional Association listings, Yellow Pages (yes, you get a free link to your website!)
Published Books – that have an ISBN code
Social Media content that is public – consider permanent LinkedIn Articles and/or Newsletters, YouTube videos, and X tweets
Online Reviews – on Google, Facebook (especially for Microsoft Copilot) and other review sites for your industry
Awards, Honours, Expert Lists, Collaborations – online content that showcases leaders of industry or profession

Gen-AI-friendly content

Whilst many businesses are using generative AI to create content, that doesn’t mean that the Generative AI tools will favour that content in Generative AI chat results. Ideally, your content needs to be: