AI search is changing how customers find businesses. Learn what your website should explain clearly and how to prepare for more conversational search.
Search is becoming more conversational.
Instead of typing a few words into Google and working through a list of results, people can increasingly ask detailed questions and receive an answer that brings together information from multiple sources.
For a small business, that creates an important question:
If someone asks AI to recommend a business like yours, will it understand what you actually do?
Will it know where you operate? Who you help? What services you provide? And will it have enough useful information to understand whether your business might be a good fit?
The answer starts with something surprisingly simple: your website.
Traditional searches tend to be relatively short.
Someone looking for an IT provider might search:
IT support Auckland
But conversational search allows them to be far more specific.
They might ask:
Who supports small Auckland businesses using Microsoft 365, with staff working both from home and in the office?
That question contains far more context.
For businesses, this means your website needs to contain enough clear and useful information for both customers and search systems to understand what you actually offer.
A homepage saying you provide “innovative solutions” and “exceptional service” doesn't tell anyone very much.
Specific information does.
Before worrying about AI optimisation, make sure your website clearly answers the basics.
A potential customer should quickly be able to understand:
This sounds obvious, but many business websites make visitors work surprisingly hard to find this information.
Your website shouldn't require someone to decode marketing language to understand what your business does.
The next step is to think about the questions prospective customers regularly ask your team.
For example:
What does the service include?
Explain what's actually included rather than simply describing the service as comprehensive.
What affects the price?
You don't necessarily need to publish a complete price list, but explaining the factors that affect pricing can help customers understand what to expect.
How does getting started work?
Explain your onboarding or setup process.
What happens when something goes wrong?
If support is an important part of your service, explain how customers get help and what the process looks like.
These are useful questions for prospective customers, but they also give search systems more meaningful information about your business.
Consider the difference between these two statements:
We deliver innovative IT solutions backed by exceptional customer service.
And:
We provide managed IT support for Auckland businesses, including Microsoft 365, cybersecurity, networks, business internet and phone systems.
The second version actually tells someone what the business does.
That doesn't mean every page should be written like a technical manual. It means your website should contain real information alongside your sales and marketing content.
Examples can be particularly useful.
If you work with businesses that have staff working remotely, explain how you support them.
If your service includes monitoring, onboarding, backups or after-hours support, explain how those things work.
If certain services suit particular types of businesses, explain that too.
Give people something useful to assess.
Clear information isn't much help if it's out of date.
Check both your website and your Google Business Profile regularly.
Make sure things such as these remain accurate:
If your business has changed what it offers, make sure old pages aren't still describing services you no longer provide.
AI search doesn't remove the need for good business information. It makes accurate information more important.
This is where businesses should be careful about some of the claims being made around AI search.
Google's position is that the established foundations of search optimisation continue to apply to its AI search features.
There isn't a special piece of “AI markup” that businesses need to add to become eligible for AI search results.
There also isn't a setting you can turn on that guarantees Google will recommend your business.
Other AI search services have their own systems, so there's no universal formula that guarantees a business will appear in every AI-generated answer either.
Be cautious about anyone promising one.
The practical approach is much less exciting, but probably much more useful:
Create a website that clearly and accurately explains your business and genuinely answers the questions prospective customers have.
You may have seen terms such as Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) or Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) being used to describe optimisation for AI-powered search.
There are useful ideas behind those terms.
For example, clearly answering questions, publishing useful information and making your services easy to understand can all help make your website more useful to both customers and search systems.
But businesses shouldn't treat AEO or GEO as completely separate from good SEO and good website content.
The fundamentals still matter:
AI search doesn't make these things obsolete.
If anything, it gives businesses another reason to get them right.
Here's something useful you can do this week.
Write down five questions that a good prospective customer would ask before choosing your business.
Then search your website for the answers.
Can you find them easily?
Are the answers clear?
Are they accurate?
Are they specific to the way your business actually works?
If not, you've just found five useful improvements you can make to your website.
You don't need to predict exactly how AI search will develop to start making your website more useful today.
Mint Technology works with New Zealand businesses across IT, Microsoft 365, cybersecurity, business internet, phone systems and cloud services.
If you're trying to make sense of the technology your business relies on, talk to Mint.
www.mint.net.nz
09 222 0220
