Where AI assistants look.

Two ways an assistant answers

An assistant can answer from what it learned during training, or it can search the web first and answer from what it finds. The first kind of answer has no list of sources and reflects the web as it was when the model was trained. The second kind is current and, in most products, comes with citations.

All three companies document search-backed answers. Anthropic says that when Claude uses information from the web, it provides direct citations so people can check the sources. OpenAI describes a web search tool that lets its models answer with sourced citations. Google explains that grounding Gemini with Google Search returns citations alongside the answer. For questions about local businesses, which depend on current information, search-backed answers are the ones that matter most.

What search-backed answers draw on

In our checks, the sources cited for local business questions fall into a few familiar groups. Business websites, especially pages that answer the question directly. Directories and listings, including map listings and sector directories. Review platforms. Local news, and occasionally forums where people ask for recommendations.

The mix depends on the question and the sector. A question about an urgent repair tends to bring up review platforms and listings. A question about a specialist service tends to bring up firm websites and professional directories. This is why we record sources per question rather than assume one list fits every business.

Citations show where an answer came from, not how much weight each source carried. We treat a source that appears across many runs and several assistants as important for that question, and a source that appears once as a weaker signal.

Can assistants read your site at all?

Before anything else, check that search crawlers are allowed to read your website. OpenAI documents its crawler for search, OAI-SearchBot, and states that sites which opt out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Your robots.txt file and any firewall or bot-blocking service decide whether such crawlers get through.

Blocking every automated visitor is a common default in some hosting set-ups. If your site blocks search crawlers, an assistant cannot cite it, however good the page is. We check this early in a paid audit because it is quick to confirm and costly to miss.

What Google says about its AI features

Google's guidance for its own AI features, AI Overviews and AI Mode, is that there are no extra requirements and no special optimisation needed to appear in them. The same foundations apply as for ordinary search: pages that can be crawled and indexed, that follow Google's policies and that are helpful to the people reading them.

That is a useful reminder that there is no secret format for AI answers. The work that helps is ordinary, careful work on the pages and listings that already describe your business.

What we record in a check

For every run, we note each cited source by type and address: the business's own site, a directory, a review platform, a map listing, a news page or a forum. Where an assistant answers without sources, we record that as well, because an answer from training data calls for different work from one built on a live search.

Across six runs and three assistants, the pattern is easier to read than any single answer. A directory cited in most runs for your question earns a place on the list of fixes. A page cited once is noted, but we do not build a plan around it.

What this means for a small business

Start with the sources the assistants actually cite for your questions. If a directory appears in most answers and your listing there is missing or out of date, that is a concrete job. If the cited pages are competitors whose sites answer the question in plain words, your own page may need to do the same.

Keep your facts consistent. Your business name, address, phone number, opening hours and services should match across your site and every listing. An assistant reading several sources has an easier task when they agree.

Then measure again. Sources change, and the only reliable way to know whether your work had an effect is to ask the same questions under the same conditions and compare.