Ask ChatGPT for a good accountant in Horsham and you won’t get ten blue links. You’ll get a handful of names and a few lines about each one. For a small business in Sussex, that changes the question. It’s no longer just “where do I rank?” It’s “am I one of the names AI mentions?”
We work on this for our own site and for clients. Our own blog posts already appear in Google’s AI answers, so we know a small local business can earn a place. Here’s what we’ve learned about how it works, and where the facts stop and the guesswork starts.
Where AI Answers Show Up
There are three places your customers are likely to meet an AI answer.
- Google’s AI Overviews appear as a summary box above the normal search results.
- Google’s AI Mode is a conversational search where people can ask follow-up questions.
- Standalone tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini answer questions without showing a page of results.
The map pack hasn’t gone anywhere, though. Whitespark research from 2025, summarised by ALM Corp, found that map packs still appeared on more than 90% of simple searches like “nail salon near me”, while AI Overviews appeared on only 15%. AI answers turn up far more often on research-style questions, such as “how do I choose a builder in Brighton?” That means you need to show up in both places.
What AI Tools Look At
Nobody outside Google or OpenAI knows the exact recipe, and anyone who tells you they do is guessing. What we do know is that AI tools lean on the same trust signals that local SEO has always relied on. Whitespark’s 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey added AI search visibility as a category for the first time, which tells you how seriously local SEO specialists now take it.
In practice, these are the signals we focus on:
- Your Google Business Profile feeds Google’s own AI features directly.
- Your reviews count, including what customers say about you as well as the star rating.
- Your website counts, especially pages that answer one clear question well.
- Mentions of your business on other trusted sites, such as local press, directories and trade associations, add to the picture.
- Your name, address and phone number should match everywhere they appear.
Write Pages That Answer the Question
If you want an AI tool to quote you, give it a clear answer to quote.
That sounds obvious, but most small business websites bury the answer under three paragraphs of warm-up.
Here’s how we’d approach it:
- Answer the main question in the first two or three sentences.
- Write from your own experience, with examples from jobs you’ve done in Sussex.
- Use clear headings so each section covers one point.
- Back up any statistic with a source.
- Keep the page focused on one topic instead of trying to rank for everything at once.
FAQs Still Help, Just Not for the Old Reason
Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in its search listings on 7 May 2026. Plenty of businesses added FAQ sections purely for those expanded listings, and that reason has gone. Clear questions and answers still help people, though, and they make it easy for AI tools to see exactly what you know. Write FAQs that your customers ask you, not ones invented to squeeze in keywords.
How to Check Whether AI Mentions You
You can’t track AI visibility perfectly yet, but you can get a decent picture.
- In Google Search Console, the Generative AI report shows how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. It shows impressions only, with no clicks.
- Search your most important questions in AI Mode and ChatGPT yourself, and note which businesses get named.
- Ask every new enquiry how they found you, and listen for “I asked ChatGPT”.
Where to Start
AI search rewards the same things good local SEO always has: a complete profile, steady reviews, helpful pages and a business that other people talk about.
If you’d like help with that, here’s how we approach local SEO for Sussex businesses.
AI visibility rests on trust, and Google has spent this year policing the shortcuts. Next, we look at what Google’s 2026 spam updates mean for Sussex websites.