When I visit customers now, one of the most common questions that they are asking is:
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“How can I make my company appear in AI search engines?”
This seems to be a real concern for many manufacturers in Taiwan and I always wonder why it is so important to them in 2025.
As I am writing this in May 2025 GPT search only accounts for 0.25% of searches with Google still at 93.57% according to recent market data. So the search volume is tiny but growing. So the question is: Do you need to worry about whether your company or products appear when we search on ChatGPT?
It’s complicated. So let’s approach this by answering these three questions:
- What is AI Search?
- Does your company need to appear in AI Search results?
- How can you help your company to appear in AI Search?
What is AI Search or GPT Search?
AI Search is often called generative search and refers to any search that is made on the live web using an LLMs like GPT, Perplexity or any other.
When GPT 3.5 first launched in late 2022 it was not web connected and used a static database from September 2021. But then in late 2023 GPT became web connected so that it could “see” the live web and access current data.
When this happened Microsoft rapidly announced AI features coming to their Bing search engine and Google announced Bard as their new AI (It is now known as Either Copilot or Gemini). Those and other search engines who had been dominating the industry since it started were scrambling to incorporate AI search results which they called ”Generative Search” into their search results pages to prevent their customers going elsewhere. Most of Google’s revenue comes from Ads so they are very keen for you to stay within their search environment…
By 2024 we started regularly seeing what they called “Generative Search Results” appearing either on the right hand side of the Google search page or at the top as they often do now. Most of these appear for what we call an “informational” query such as “How can I…” or “How do I…” ; simple questions with factual answers..
AI search results are finally getting it right!
This is not good news for digital marketers though. Generative search results are now often called “Stolen search traffic” or “Zero click traffic” because the sites that provided the information (Like yours) may not be referenced or receive clicks even though their data has been used.
Do you need your company to appear in AI search results?
The importance of this depends a lot on who your customers are and whether they are the kind of people who will search for potential suppliers using an AI search engine or not.
For many Taiwan manufacturers who are making products that are “Real B2B Products” such as industrial machinery, at the moment I think that the need to appear in AI search is negligible as most of your customers are not going to be searching that way. They will be doing web searches, visiting exhibitions, or are introduced to your brand through other customers you have worked with.
If you are a manufacturer who is creating B2C products and selling them either as OEM or OBM then the situation may be different. There may be a lot more competition in your market, and both end users and distributors may be searching for your products directly online. In this case it would be a good thing for your brand to appear when people are searching for lists of manufacturers or product brands.
High quality results at last!
How Can You Help Your Company to Appear in AI Search Results?
At the moment the challenge that all marketing companies are facing is that there is very little data available other than simple search traffic to help us understand how websites are being ranked by these AI search engines. Google did reveal that AI search data will be coming to Google soon, but this will only apply to Google’s own AI searches and not the data from other platforms, so I am not sure how useful this will really be.
What we do know is that these search engines really like questions and answers that they can serve up to searchers. We also know that they are looking at the reputation of websites (in a similar way to Google) as they often show us the sites that they have referenced when they give us answers.
This means that what you need is great content which people read and share as well as great website engagement to help improve your domain authority and ranking.
Challenges to being featured in AI Search
- If your site is just a product-and-spec catalog, AI models have too little context to pull answers from.
- Without a dedicated company blog, you miss out on fresh content that both AI and Google rely on.
- Limited useful text on your pages means AI search can’t show your content to customers
A blog is essential to help your site be found in AI Search
I recommend that you start with these three basic items:
- Make sure your website has high quality content & FAQs that answer customers questions
- Add a blog to your website or start to add posts to your “news” page regularly
- Consider adding an AI website chatbot for support to improve engagement time.
You could also read about why In 2025, Website Design Isn’t Enough You Need a B2B Blog
And I suggest you also read about B2B Website content Creation as getting this right is critical to anyone finding your website..
If you would like to find out more about AI Marketing or if you have any questions about how this can be implemented for your business, please give us a call.