Getting Cited by AI Search: A Burnaby Owner's Guide

Every few weeks a business owner asks us some version of the same question. "My customers are asking ChatGPT instead of Googling. How do I show up in there?"

It's a reasonable worry, and there's a lot of nonsense being sold around it. So here is what the vendors' own documentation actually says as of September 2026, what you can control, and what the click data says about whether the effort pays back.

Google's bar is lower than the hype suggests

Google publishes a specific eligibility rule. Per Google Search Central's AI features and your website documentation, "To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the Search technical requirements."

That's the whole gate. Indexed, snippet eligible, meets the technical requirements. If you've set `nosnippet`, `data-nosnippet`, `max-snippet` or `noindex` on a page, you have opted that content out of being quoted, which is exactly what those controls are documented to do.

More useful is what Google says you do *not* need. Its guide to optimizing for generative AI features states that "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add," that "There's no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it," and that "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search." That last one covers llms.txt, which a lot of agencies are currently charging for.

Google's stated reason is that the generative features run on the same ranking and quality systems as regular Search. So the honest version of "optimize for AI Overviews" is: be indexable, be snippet eligible, and publish something a person would actually find useful.

ChatGPT has one switch that genuinely matters

This is the part most Metro Vancouver sites get wrong, and it takes ten minutes to check.

OpenAI documents four separate crawlers in its overview of OpenAI crawlers, and they do different jobs:

• OAI-SearchBot is "used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features." OpenAI states plainly that "Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links."
• GPTBot is used "to crawl content that may be used in training our generative AI foundation models." Blocking it is a training decision, not a visibility one.
• ChatGPT-User handles user initiated visits when someone asks ChatGPT a question. OpenAI notes that "robots.txt rules may not apply" to these, and that "ChatGPT-User is not used to determine whether content may appear in Search."
• OAI-AdsBot only validates the safety of pages submitted as ads, and OpenAI says that data isn't used for model training.

Here's the practical consequence. Back in 2023 and 2024, plenty of site owners and their developers pasted in a blanket "block the AI bots" snippet, or installed a plugin that did it for them, and never revisited the file. If that snippet disallowed OAI-SearchBot, you removed yourself from ChatGPT's search answers by your own hand.

Blocking GPTBot while allowing OAI-SearchBot is a coherent, defensible position: stay out of model training, stay in the answers. Open your robots.txt at yourdomain.com/robots.txt and read it. If you can't tell what it does, that's a sign it needs a look.

How to tell if any of it is working

Google added reporting for this. On June 3, 2026, Search Central announced generative AI performance reports in Search Console, showing "Impressions: How often URLs from your site appeared in generative AI features in Search and Discover," plus breakdowns by page, country, device and date. Google says it is "rolling these reports out to a subset of websites," so you may not have it yet. In the meantime that traffic still lands in your regular Performance report under the Web search type, per Google's AI features documentation.

ChatGPT has no equivalent dashboard. What you can do is check your server logs for OAI-SearchBot hits to confirm you're being crawled, and watch for referral traffic from chatgpt.com in your analytics. It's a coarser signal, but it's real data rather than a vendor's dashboard estimate.

Where this doesn't apply

Now the part that cuts against the whole exercise.

Getting cited is not the same as getting a visit. The Pew Research Center analyzed the browsing data of 900 US adults during March 2025 and found that users who encountered an AI summary "clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits," while those who didn't see one clicked "nearly twice as often (15% of visits)." Clicks on the links inside the summary itself happened in "just 1% of all visits." Sessions ended on 26% of pages with an AI summary versus 16% of pages without.

Two caveats on that study, in fairness: it covers US adults, and March 2025 predates Google's wider AI Mode rollout, so the numbers describe a moment rather than today. But the direction is hard to argue with. If your business case for content depends on click volume, an AI Overview above your listing is competition, not a distribution channel.

There are cases where you should skip this entirely for now:

If you run an emergency trades business in Burnaby and your customers search "plumber near me" on a phone, your money is in Google Business Profile, reviews, and answering the phone at 9pm. AI Overviews are barely in that path. If your leads come from referrals and repeat customers, the same applies. And if your site is thin or slow, none of this matters, because you can't be cited from a page that isn't snippet eligible in the first place.

Sources also disagree here, and you should know that. Google's position is that no special optimization exists. A growing consulting niche sells "GEO" or "answer engine optimization" packages that assume otherwise. We lean toward the documentation. Writing content that's easy to quote, with clear claims, dates and named sources, seems like a sensible bet, but we haven't seen a controlled public study proving it moves citation rates, so we won't sell it as one.

The Canadian context worth noting

Adoption is moving fast enough that this stops being theoretical. Statistics Canada reported on June 11, 2026 that "In the second quarter of 2026, 19.2% of businesses reported using AI to produce goods or deliver services over the 12 months preceding the survey," a proportion that has tripled since the second quarter of 2024 (6.1%). Roughly one fifth (19.9%) of the smallest businesses, those with 1 to 4 employees, reported the same.

Your customers are in that shift too. More of them are asking an assistant before they ask a search box. The counterintuitive takeaway is that the fix is mostly maintenance work: check robots.txt, keep pages indexed and snippet eligible, remove any accidental blocks, publish things worth quoting, and measure what you can.

If you'd like a second set of eyes on your robots.txt and your snippet settings, or you want to work out whether AI search is worth your attention at all given where your leads actually come from, we're happy to look. Autana Solutions is based in Burnaby and works with businesses across New Westminster and the Lower Mainland. Book a free call and we'll tell you honestly if there's nothing to fix.

Sources

• Google Search Central. "AI features and your website." Google for Developers, accessed September 2026. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
• Google Search Central. "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search." Google for Developers, accessed September 2026. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
• Google Search Central Blog. "Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console." June 3, 2026. https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/06/gen-ai-performance-reports
• OpenAI. "Overview of OpenAI Crawlers." OpenAI Developers documentation, accessed September 2026. https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
• Pew Research Center. "Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results." July 22, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
• Statistics Canada. "Analysis on artificial intelligence use by businesses in Canada, second quarter of 2026." June 11, 2026. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-621-m/11-621-m2026010-eng.htm