The start-here guide. What changed, how each platform decides what to say, and the 90-day plan to make sure it says your name.
AI search means customers get recommendations instead of links. To be recommended, an Australian business needs four things: a consistent public identity, machine-readable facts (schema), independent citations AI trusts, and content that answers real questions directly. This guide covers all four, platform by platform, with a 90-day plan.
Three shifts happened at once. Search results grew an AI summary on top (Google AI Overviews), assistants became a starting point for buying research (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot), and research tools began compiling recommendations from multiple sources automatically (Perplexity, Deep Research). In each case the customer sees a small number of named businesses — not ten links to compare. Winner-takes-most replaced page-one-takes-all.
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Every platform above reads the same public record, so the same four foundations serve all of them. 1. Entity consistency — identical name, category, location and offer on every profile and directory (what's an entity?). 2. Structured data — Organization, Service, FAQ and Review schema so machines can quote facts, not guess from prose (generate yours here). 3. Independent citations — mentions on industry sites, associations, local press and directories; AI weighs what others say more than what you say. 4. Answer-shaped content — one real question per page, answered in the first paragraph.
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Go deeper: the AEO guide, how ChatGPT picks who to recommend, or start measuring with the score calculator and prompt pack.