How a Bangalore Business Gets Cited by ChatGPT and Google’s AI Answers

The Question Has Changed

A growing share of people in Bengaluru now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overview which agency, clinic or school to look at, and get a short written answer with a few businesses named in it. If yours isn’t one of them, the ten blue links underneath matter less than they used to.

There’s a lot of confident advice about “AI SEO” right now, most of it selling something. This is narrower: what we actually checked and changed on our own site this week, what each change is for, and what we still can’t measure.

Where AI Answers Come From

AI assistants don’t invent their sources. They pull from search indexes and their own crawlers, and that decides where you need to be visible:

• Google’s AI Overviews are built from Google’s own index. If a page isn’t indexed and trusted in normal Google search, it won’t be quoted in the AI answer above it either.
• Microsoft Copilot answers from Bing.
• ChatGPT’s search draws on third-party search providers — Bing among them, by most accounts — plus OpenAI’s own crawler, OAI-SearchBot.
• Perplexity runs its own crawler, PerplexityBot, alongside other sources.

The practical point most businesses in India miss: Bing matters again. Plenty of Indian sites have never once checked how Bing sees them, because Bing sends them almost no traffic. It now feeds two of the four assistants above.

What We Checked on Our Own Site

1. Can the AI crawlers get in? Our robots.txt allowed every crawler — but on a closer look it listed “Allow: /” before the line blocking our contact-form handler. Google reads the most specific rule wherever it sits; some parsers stop at the first match and would have read the handler as open. A small thing, fixed by swapping two lines. The broader rule: if you block AI crawlers by accident, nothing else here matters.

2. Does our business listing say the right thing? Bing’s business listing for us still showed an old address. When someone asks an assistant for an agency near them, listings like this are what it reads. If your Google Business Profile, Bing Places listing and website disagree, an assistant has no reason to trust any of them.

3. Can our pages be quoted? AI answers lift short passages that answer a question directly. Long articles that build up to the point are hard to quote. We added short question-and-answer sections, written answer-first, to the five posts that already get the most search impressions — on the questions people were actually typing, taken from our own Search Console.

4. Is it clear who is behind the content? Our posts were credited to the company, not a person. They now carry a named author with a real professional history, and the site’s structured data says who founded the business and links to the profiles that confirm it.

What We Did Not Bother With

An llms.txt file is a proposed standard: a plain-text index of your site for AI tools. We have one, because it costs nothing to keep current. But no major assistant has publicly confirmed it reads them, so treat it as cheap insurance, not a ranking lever.

We also didn’t rewrite anything “for AI”. The pages most likely to be cited are the same ones that already serve a human reader well: specific, accurate, and easy to answer from.

What We Can’t Measure Yet

Honestly, most of it. Clicks from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot show up in Google Analytics as referrals from their own domains, so we have set up a separate channel for them and started counting this week. Clicks from Google’s AI Overviews are folded into ordinary Google search traffic, and there’s currently no way to separate them out.

A Short Checklist for Your Own Site

1. Check robots.txt isn’t blocking OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Bingbot — and that any Disallow lines come before a blanket Allow.
2. Make your listings match. Same name, address and phone on your Google Business Profile, Bing Places and website.
3. Get into Bing. Bing Webmaster Tools can import your Google Search Console setup in a few clicks.
4. Answer questions directly. Add a short FAQ to the pages that already rank, using the questions your customers actually search.
5. Put a real name on your content. A credited author with a verifiable background is easier to trust — for people and for machines.
6. Measure what you can. Separate AI referrals in Google Analytics now, so you have a baseline before you need one.

None of this is a shortcut around ordinary SEO — an assistant can only cite a page that search engines already find and trust. Our SEO team works through both with businesses across Bengaluru, and the review side of it is covered on our reputation management page. For where local search itself stands, see what our new Bangalore SEO pages have taught us so far.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does blocking GPTBot stop my site appearing in ChatGPT?

Not on its own. OpenAI uses separate crawlers: GPTBot collects content for training its models, while OAI-SearchBot is what ChatGPT’s search uses. According to OpenAI, blocking GPTBot opts you out of training but still leaves you eligible to appear in ChatGPT search, as long as OAI-SearchBot is allowed.

Do I need an llms.txt file?

It’s optional. llms.txt is a proposed standard, and no major AI assistant has publicly confirmed reading it. Keeping one costs almost nothing if your site already generates it, but it won’t make up for pages that aren’t indexed or easy to quote.

How can I tell if AI tools are sending me visitors?

In Google Analytics, visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot arrive as referrals from their own domains, so a custom channel group can separate them. Clicks from Google’s AI Overviews count as ordinary Google search traffic and can’t currently be separated.