A question worth asking right now

Open ChatGPT or Perplexity. Type: “What’s a good law firm in Ottawa for employment matters?” or “Can you recommend a physiotherapy clinic in Ottawa?” or “Who are the best fee-only financial planners in Ottawa?”

Look at the answer. Are you in it?

 If you’re not , and most businesses aren’t, that’s not because AI search doesn’t know you exist. It’s because your website isn’t structured in a way that AI systems can reliably retrieve, understand, and cite.

How AI search actually works

Traditional search engines return a list of links and let you choose. AI search engines synthesize an answer and name specific businesses, sources, or resources. The algorithm isn’t ranking pages — it’s selecting content it can trust to answer a specific question accurately.

To be selected, your content needs to meet different criteria than traditional SEO. Keyword density matters less. What matters more:

• Whether your content directly answers the questions your potential clients are asking.

• Whether your website has structured data (schema markup) that tells AI systems who you are, what you do, and where you are.

• Whether your content is clear enough and specific enough for an AI to cite it confidently.

• Whether you have clear entity signals, consistent business information across your site, your Google Business Profile, and other authoritative sources.

Why the timing matters

AI search is not a future development. ChatGPT has over 100 million weekly users. Perplexity is growing rapidly. Google AI Overviews now appear above the search results for an increasing proportion of queries.

The businesses appearing in those answers right now are building a compounding visibility advantage. They’re being cited, which builds authority signals, which increases the likelihood of being cited again. The businesses that aren’t appearing are losing visibility quietly, in a way that organic traffic data doesn’t fully capture.

The window for establishing early visibility in your sector is real. It is also finite. Once the market becomes crowded with competitors who have optimized for AI retrieval, the advantage of being early disappears.

How to find out where you stand

There are a few things you can do yourself to get an initial read:

1. Search for your service category + city in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Note who appears and what language they use.

2. Check your website’s page source for structured data. You’re looking for JSON-LD schema markup — if there’s none, that’s a significant gap.

3. Look at your Google Business Profile. Is it complete, accurate, and consistent with what’s on your website? AI systems cross-reference these signals.

4. Read your own ‘About’ and ‘Services’ pages out loud. If they don’t directly answer the questions your potential clients are asking, AI systems won’t use them to answer those questions either.

What a professional assessment adds

A self-check tells you whether you’re visible. It doesn’t tell you why, or what to do about it — and it certainly doesn’t tell you how your specific competitors are structured differently from you.

An AI Search Visibility Audit maps your current position in AI-generated search results, tests how your content performs across the questions your clients are actually asking, compares you against your top competitors, and produces a prioritized action list. Not a theoretical recommendation, but specific structural changes ranked by their likely impact on your AI search visibility.