How to get found on ChatGPT: a guide for Swiss SMEs.

At a glance

• 76% of adults in Switzerland use an AI assistant. Among people who know chatbots, four in ten use them instead of Google or Bing.
• There’s no “first place on ChatGPT”: the same question gets a different list every time. What counts is how many answers you appear in.
• For Google it’s still SEO, and Google says so itself: a readable website, a well-kept business profile, useful content. No magic file.

Tuesday evening. Someone types into ChatGPT: “I’m looking for an accountant in the Mendrisio area who speaks Italian and German.” Back come three names, with two lines on each. Yours isn’t one of them, even though you’ve done that job for twenty years, ten minutes from their front door. Getting found on ChatGPT today means being there at that moment.

The scene is made up; the question isn’t. Here you’ll find out how many people in Switzerland already ask questions like this, where the assistant gets its names and what you can fix yourself. Plus something many sales pitches leave out: nobody can guarantee you first place.

How many Swiss people already ask AI

In March 2026, the Innofact institute surveyed 1,035 adults across every region of Switzerland on behalf of Comparis. 76.1% use tools such as ChatGPT, up from 49.7% in 2024 and 62.4% in 20251.

4 in 10

The figures vary with how the question is asked: according to the Federal Statistical Office, 47% of the population used generative AI in 2025, putting Switzerland third in Europe after Norway and Denmark2. The point stands: a large share of your customers already put their questions to a machine.

The questions have changed too. Google’s AI Mode, where search becomes a conversation, has been available in Switzerland since October 20253, and its early users were typing questions two to three times as long as a traditional search4. Not “plumber Lugano” any more, but “plumber in Lugano who can come tomorrow morning to fix a leaking boiler”: a question that calls for a few names, not ten links.

In the United States, 45% of consumers have already asked ChatGPT or a similar tool to recommend a local business, up from 6% a year earlier5. We haven’t found a comparable figure for Switzerland.

Where an AI assistant gets its names

An AI assistant doesn’t have a directory of Swiss companies. When you ask it for a name, it comes up with one in one of two ways: from memory, using what it read during training, or by searching the web while it answers.

The two ways an AI assistant finds names

Criterion	From memory	By searching the web
Where the names come from	Texts it read up to its training cut-off date	Pages it finds and reads today
OpenAI’s crawler	GPTBot	OAI-SearchBot
How much you can influence	Little, and slowly	A lot: website, listings, reviews

For a local business, the second route matters most, because questions like “who would you recommend in Bellinzona?” need fresh information. OpenAI states that sites blocking its OAI-SearchBot crawler are not shown in ChatGPT’s search answers, though they can still appear as plain navigational links6.

Google works in a similar way for the AI Overviews at the top of its results, live in Switzerland since March 20257. It takes pages from its index, using the same systems that rank ordinary results, and uses them to write the answer. It often runs further searches related to the question on its own: Google calls this query fan-out8. For “physiotherapist in Chiasso who also does home visits”, it may also look up opening hours, reviews and the areas covered.

Beyond your website, AI reads what others write about you: listings, directories, reviews, articles, forums. For local businesses, Google spells it out: a Business Profile helps you appear both in AI answers and in ordinary results8. That’s why the work doesn’t stop at your website.

There’s no “first place on ChatGPT”

Plenty of GEO offers (generative engine optimisation, the work of appearing in AI answers) promise to get you to the top of ChatGPT. Before you sign, look at what the US company SparkToro measured.

In January 2026, six hundred volunteers put the same recommendation questions to ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI, 2,961 times in total9. Ask ChatGPT or Google’s AI the same question twice, and the chance of getting the same list of brands is under 1%. In the same order, roughly one time in a thousand.

There’s no ranking to climb on ChatGPT. You appear more often, or less often.

For the researchers, the meaningful measure is the share of answers you appear in, across many repeated questions. Your position in a ranking isn’t. Google, too, warns against tools that promise a good ranking or claim to use Google’s “internal” metrics: “No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems”8.

If someone guarantees you first place, ask them how they measure it. We don’t give that guarantee, and we say so in the AI Visibility FAQs.

For Google, it’s still SEO (and Google says so)

In July 2026, Google updated its guide for anyone who wants to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. This is the most useful sentence in it.

“From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”

In the same guide, Google lists the things you can safely ignore, as far as its search is concerned8:

• “AI files” such as llms.txt. Google Search doesn’t use them, for better or worse. Other services may read them (our own site has one), but for Google they change nothing.
• Chopping up or rewriting your text for AI, or creating a page for every variation of the same question. If you do it to manipulate the answers, Google treats it as spam.
• Structured data as a shortcut. It’s the code that describes your business to search engines: you don’t need it for AI, but it remains useful for ordinary SEO.

And AI Overviews cost websites clicks.

These are US figures from March 2025, based on the browsing of 900 adults10; there are no reliable public figures for Switzerland. If the answer is enough, the click never comes. That’s why it matters to be the name inside the answer, not just the link below it.

On what helps you get cited, there’s at least one serious study, presented in 2024 at the KDD scientific conference by researchers from Princeton and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Adding sources, quotations and statistics to a text raised its visibility in AI answers by up to 40%; stuffing it with keywords did almost nothing11. It’s a lab experiment, not a guarantee. But the message is clear: AI likes to cite people who write facts and figures.

Getting found on ChatGPT: five things to do yourself

You can do them on your own, without an agency, in a few hours.

1. Open the door to AI crawlers. Type your website address into your browser, followed by /robots.txt. If you see “Disallow: /” under OAI-SearchBot, or under the asterisk that applies to all crawlers, ChatGPT can’t show you in its search answers. The fix is one line, and OpenAI picks it up within about 24 hours6. If your site runs through Cloudflare, check there too: since July 2025 it asks every new domain whether to let in the programs that read websites on behalf of AI12.
2. Use the same details everywhere. Name, address, phone number and opening hours identical on your website, on Google, on local.ch and on search.ch. Sign up to Bing Places too: Microsoft says it helps keep those details up to date and usable in AI answers13.
3. Answer the questions people actually ask. A page with the questions you get on the phone, each with its answer: rough prices, areas covered, lead times. If you write down what it costs to renovate a bathroom in Locarno, AI has something to cite. That’s exactly what Google asks for: content that says more than what you can find everywhere else8.
4. Ask every customer for a review. Including those who might complain, and without discounts in return: Google’s rules ban both incentives and requests aimed only at happy customers14. A link or a QR code on the invoice is all it takes.
5. Run the ten-question test. Write ten questions the way one of your customers would, and put them to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google, three times each. Note who gets named and count how often you’re there. Repeat the test three months later.

For numbers that are less home-made, there are two free tools: the generative AI report in Search Console8 and, since February 2026, the one in Bing Webmaster Tools, which counts how often Copilot and Bing’s AI answers cite your pages13.

When it’s worth getting help, and when it isn’t

The five steps above are the foundation. The long-term work is finding out which sites AI draws on in your sector and showing up there, writing pages that answer real questions, and tracking the same questions against your competitors every week.

That’s the job of AI Visibility. It starts with a free analysis: we look at how your company appears in AI answers today and where there’s room to improve. Then the Tune-up works on your website, content, data, outside presence and technical setup, at a price set after the analysis. You’ll find how to get started on the AI Visibility page.

If your website is old or can’t be edited, start there: a new website with basic SEO costs from CHF 890. To find out where you stand today, there’s our free 30-minute consultation.

Sources

1. Medienmitteilung: Bereits drei Viertel der Bevölkerung nutzen KI-Helfer wie ChatGPT & Co. Comparis, Innofact survey of 1,035 adults across all regions (March 2026), press release of 2 April 2026 (in German).
2. Uses of generative AI by the population in 2025. Federal Statistical Office (FSO), 21 April 2026.
3. AI mode in Google Search is coming to Switzerland and Europe. blue News, 8 October 2025.
4. AI Mode arriva anche in Italia! Google Italy blog, 8 October 2025 (in Italian).
5. Local Consumer Review Survey 2026. BrightLocal, 11 February 2026. Survey of 1,002 adults in the United States.
6. Overview of OpenAI Crawlers. OpenAI, developer documentation (accessed 11 August 2026).
7. We’re bringing the helpfulness of AI Overviews to more countries in Europe. Google, 25 March 2025.
8. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. Google Search Central, updated 10 July 2026.
9. New research: AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands or products. Rand Fishkin, SparkToro, 28 January 2026. 600 volunteers, 2,961 runs on ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI.
10. Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025. Browsing data from 900 adults in the United States, March 2025.
11. GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. P. Aggarwal, V. Murahari, T. Rajpurohit, A. Kalyan, K. Narasimhan, A. Deshpande (Princeton University and Indian Institute of Technology Delhi). KDD 2024 conference.
12. Cloudflare Just Changed How AI Crawlers Scrape the Internet at Large. Cloudflare, press release, 1 July 2025.
13. Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview. Microsoft Bing, Webmaster Blog, 10 February 2026.
14. Prohibited & restricted content (Maps User Generated Content Policy). Google, Maps Help (accessed 11 August 2026).

Written by Alessandro Scerpella. Sources checked on 11 August 2026. This article is not professional advice: if you spot a figure that doesn’t add up, write to us at info@digitam.ch.