If you've spent the last year optimising your homepage for AI search, you've probably been working on the wrong page. Across 1,296 answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity about 36 Northern Irish businesses, the assistants drew on 2,471 different sources to build their recommendations. The businesses' own websites barely featured.
The number that changes the playbook
2,471 distinct sources to answer 1,296 questions. Almost all of them third-party. Directories. Best-of listicles. Review platforms. Reddit threads. Travel guides. The places your customers spend time when they're trying to choose.
Look through any answer about a Belfast hotel and you'll find TripAdvisor cited five times before the hotel's own site is cited once. Look at an accountancy recommendation and you'll see Clutch and the Belfast Chamber long before anyone's about page.
Why your site doesn't decide whether you're recommended
AI assistants don't decide whether to recommend you by reading your homepage. They decide by reading what the rest of the web says about you. Your meta tags, your H1 hierarchy, your schema markup, the page speed work, the technical SEO audit, all of it is about being indexed. Being recommended is something else.
Your own website does matter for one thing once you're already in the answer. It's where assistants verify the facts they're about to claim. Your site keeps the description accurate. It doesn't decide whether you get described at all.
This is closer to PR than SEO
The familiar AEO playbook is to fix what's broken on your own page. Schema, metadata, page speed, technical SEO. Solid work, well-known levers, important in their own right.
The work that actually moves AI recommendation reads more like brand strategy and PR. Where are you mentioned that matters? Are your details consistent everywhere you appear? Are you in the directories AI is checking for your category? Are people writing about you in places that get indexed and cited? That's reputation work. It's not impossible. It's just done by different people than the ones running your SEO audit.
What to do instead
Start by mapping the sources. Search the questions your buyers ask, see what AI cites in its answers. The pattern will be obvious within five searches. A handful of directories, listicles and review platforms over and over.
Get listed where you're missing. Tighten your details where they're inconsistent. Earn third-party mentions where you have proof to show. Then check the same questions again in four to six weeks and see whether the answers have shifted.
Read the full research for the per-sector source breakdowns and the specific platforms AI leaned on most across hospitality, accountancy and agencies.
See where your business stands
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