DIY resources · How AI works
How does AI decide whom to recommend?
It searches, reads a handful of pages, and writes one answer from what it read. It only knows what it reads.
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A sample, worked through
Follow one customer's question.
In the sample, a customer asks an AI tool for a furnace repair near them this week, and what it costs. The tool turns the question into three searches, finds four pages and reads three of them: a map listing, a review site and an old news story. It does not read the business's own site. Its answer gives last year's price, from the old story.
A sample. Not a real business.
- 1 of 4A customer asks one question.On a phone, the way they would ask a neighbor.
- 2 of 4It becomes several searches at once.The AI tool fans one question out into a few searches of its own.
- 3 of 4It reads a handful of pages.Yours, or someone else's. Here it read a listing, reviews and an old story, and skipped the business's own site.
- 4 of 4It writes one answer from what it read.The old story still had last year's price, so the answer does too.
The answer
An AI tool turns your customer's question into a few searches, reads a handful of pages, and repeats what those pages say. You don't control where it looks. You can change what it finds.
Key points
- Search gave a list of links. An AI tool gives one answer, and there is often no second place.
- The less well known a business is, the more the answer depends on the pages the tool reads that day.
- It reads your pages, or someone else's: listings, reviews, old stories.
- Old pages give old answers.
- Each AI tool reads the web its own way, so check more than one.
One answer, not a list
If someone asked an AI tool to recommend a business like yours right now, would yours come up? Ask it. That question opens our workshops, and it is the right place to start.
Search used to give a list of links. A business on page two still got a few calls. An AI tool gives one answer, and a business on page two of Google may never appear in it. The rules changed, and most local businesses did not get the memo.
People click through less, too. In one study of how people browse, they clicked a result far less often when an AI summary was showing.
15%of visits with no AI summary ended in a click on a result.
8%with an AI summary showing.
1%clicked a link inside the summary.
Pew Research Center, browsing data from 900 US adults, March 2025.
How an answer gets made
One question becomes several searches at once. Google calls it fanning out. The tool reads a handful of the pages it finds, then writes a summary of what it read. That summary is the answer your customer sees.
The less famous you are, the more depends on what it reads that day. A household name lives in the tool's memory. A repair shop in a small town mostly does not, so its answer is built from whatever pages turn up: your own site if it is read, and everyone else's pages about you if it is not.
You don't control where it looks. You control what it finds.
Google Search Central, “AI features and your website”; a 2023 research paper on why the less famous a subject is, the more an answer depends on what is read.
It reads signals, not your design
An AI reading your site does not see your photos, your fonts or your layout. It looks for signals: who you are, what you do, where you are, and whether that matches everywhere else it looks. If those signals are missing or don't agree, it has nothing to repeat.
- Your name, address and phone, identical on every listing, letter for letter.
- Your Google Business Profile: complete, accurate and kept up.
- Reviews that are recent and answered.
- Plain words on your own pages: what you do, the towns you serve, your hours. Written as text, not in a picture.
Most small business sites were built to look good to people. That still matters. It is not what a machine reads.
What moves the answer, and what does not
Here is what the research says so far, in plain words.
Evidence points to
- Being talked about. Mentions of you, not only links to you.
- Clear, well-organized pages. Plain facts, real headings, solid sections.
- Speed, as a floor. A very slow page loses. A fast one doesn't gain.
- The record others keep. Listings, directories and review sites.
- Letting AI tools in. A site that turns their search readers away can't be read.
No evidence, so far
- llms.txt files on their own.
- Schema on its own.
- AI optimization tricks.
Files written for machines are still worth having: they help a machine read your facts right. Readable by machines takes each one in turn. On their own, no study so far shows they change who gets named.
Ask anyone selling a trick for a before and after. Us included.
Ahrefs, mentions across 75,000 brands (2025) and schema (2026); SE Ranking, llms.txt across about 300,000 sites and ChatGPT citations across 216,000 pages (2025); SALT.agency, 107,000 AI Overview pages (2026); a 2026 review of 45 studies (preprint); Google Search Central.
Four tools, four readers
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude each read the web their own way, so the same question can come back four different ways on the same afternoon.
- ChatGPT searches through outside search engines and partners.
- Gemini searches with Google Search.
- Perplexity keeps its own index of the web.
- Claude has been reported to search with Brave Search.
So test more than one tool. When an answer changes, ask which reader moved. And make the truth easy for all four to find.
OpenAI, “Introducing ChatGPT search” (2024); Google, “Grounding with Google Search”; Perplexity, “Introducing the Perplexity Search API” (2025); TechCrunch, March 2025 (reported, not confirmed by Anthropic).
Read the answer like a news clip
You already know how to read a news clip about your business: who wrote it, what's right, where it came from. Ask the same of every AI answer. Four questions.
- Named. Did you show up?
- Said. Is it true, and is it current?
- Sourced. Which pages did it read? Click them. No sources usually means it answered from memory.
- Neighbors. Who is beside you, and who wrote their line?
Ask more than once, and read the sources every time. One answer can tell one story and the next one another. That is why Scout asks many times over: see what AI tells your customers about you, every month, for $149 a month. You can also do it yourself, this afternoon.
Try it this week
- Ask two AI tools the question your customers ask before they call, with your town in it.
- Ask the four questions of each answer, and write down what you find.
- Search your own business name. Does what comes up match what your own site says?
- Fix the first wrong thing at its source: your own page, your listing, or the old page that still says it.
Keep your notes, and ask again next season. You will see what moved.
From Mark Ulett's AI workshops and talks. BeargrassAI, Columbia Falls, Montana.
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