How to appear in ChatGPT, Copilot and Google AI summaries

More and more people no longer search on Google. They ask ChatGPT "which company would you recommend", and the assistant gives them three names and a summary. If you are not there, you do not exist for that person — whatever position you hold in the classic results.

We tested this on our own site and learned things the guides do not mention. This article is about what we did, what worked and what did not.

The four sources do not behave alike

First discovery: there is no such thing as "AI optimisation" in the singular. We asked the same question — "which companies build websites in Bistrița" — in four places, on the same day. The results were completely different.

Same company, same site, same day. The difference comes from what each one reads:

• ChatGPT actually opens the pages and reads the text. Whoever has clear, complete content wins here.
• Copilot relies on Bing and on business listings. Here the business profile and reviews matter, not the site copy.
• Perplexity prefers sources with authority — directories, lists, third-party articles. A young site appears late, however well written.
• Google's AI summaries extract from already-indexed pages, but to a pattern of their own — more on that below.

The pattern Google's summaries extract

This was the most useful discovery. We searched a term from our field and read the generated summary carefully, including which source it cited and how many times.

The structure was always the same: a definition, then "what it includes", then "benefits". And the source cited four times was a page built exactly that way.

That is not coincidence, it is a recipe. We rewrote our consultancy page to that pattern: a paragraph beginning "Web consultancy means…" that stands on its own when quoted, then a section titled "What it includes", then one on benefits. The same question reappears in the FAQ, with a complete answer.

The simple rule: write every answer so it can be cut out of the page and still be correct. If a sentence only makes sense with the paragraph before it, a model will not quote it.

What we did, in order of effect

1. We fixed indexing, before anything else

None of what follows matters if the engines have not read your pages. In our case Google had discovered 64 pages and indexed four. The rest were marked "discovered, currently not indexed" — meaning it knew them and had decided they were not worth the effort.

The cause was mundane: the home page, the only one with any authority, linked to no case study and no article. The discovery chain was broken. Once we rebuilt it — direct links from the front page, a blog section, footer links — indexing rose from 4 to 73 pages in three weeks.

2. We added an llms.txt file

It is a new convention (llmstxt.org): a text file in Markdown at the site root, summarising who you are, what you do and what you have delivered, with links and short descriptions. An assistant reads it once and understands the whole site without crawling dozens of pages.

It is not a universally adopted standard and it guarantees nothing. But it takes an hour and, unlike much of SEO, it cannot break anything.

3. We unblocked AI crawlers — because they were blocked without our knowing

This one deserves a warning. CDN-style security services have added options to block AI crawlers over the past year, and some are on by default. In our case the automatically generated robots.txt was denying GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot and — worst of all — Google-Extended, the one feeding Google's summaries.

Check your file right now: open your-site.com/robots.txt and look for those names. You can be invisible to assistants without ever having decided to be.

4. We put structured data on every page

JSON-LD markup: who the company is, where it is, what services it offers, what the frequent questions are. It is the same work you were doing anyway for Google's rich results, but now it has a second beneficiary — models read structured data more easily than free text.

5. We wrote answers, not presentation copy

An assistant does not quote "we are a team passionate about technology". It quotes "a standard online store starts at around €900". Figures, ranges, deadlines, conditions. Every verifiable statement is a quotable statement.

What did not work

Our informational articles — including a good one on pricing — are cited by nobody. When we asked Perplexity "what does a website cost in Romania", it cited other sources.

The reason is not the quality of the text but the lack of authority: the article is new, on a domain without external links. Assistants prefer sources they find mentioned in many places. There is no shortcut here — it is solved with time and real links, not with formatting.

The honest conclusion: you can win quickly on local questions; on general ones, you cannot. A young site from Bistrița can reach first place for "web design companies in Bistrița" within weeks. For "what does a website cost" it is competing with ten-year-old domains.

What you can do this week

1. Check robots.txt and see whether you are blocking AI crawlers without knowing.
2. Check indexing in Search Console. If many pages are "discovered, currently not indexed", that is your problem, not the copy.
3. Take your five most important pages and rewrite the first paragraph as a stand-alone definition.
4. Put in figures where you now have adjectives. Price, duration, number of projects, years in business.
5. Complete your business listing — for Copilot it matters more than the site. Hours, services, description, and above all reviews.
6. Test it. Ask the four assistants what a client would ask and see where you appear. It takes five minutes and tells you more than any report.

In short

• There is no single optimisation: ChatGPT reads the site, Copilot reads the business listing, Perplexity reads directories.
• Google's summaries extract the pattern definition → what it includes → benefits. Write to it.
• Indexing is the precondition. Without it, the rest is decoration.
• Check that you are not blocking AI crawlers in your security settings — it happens by default.
• Write sentences that stay correct when lifted out of context. Those get quoted.
• Local is won quickly, national slowly. Choose your battle.