How to Show Up When Buyers Ask AI Instead of Google

Search behavior is shifting in a way that matters for every marketplace founder.

A buyer looking for a wedding photographer used to type "wedding photographer Chicago" into Google and scan the results. More of them now ask ChatGPT. Or Perplexity. Or they see an AI Overview at the top of a Google search and read the answer without clicking through.

The query has not changed. The behavior around it has. And the sources those AI systems draw from are different from the sources that rank in traditional organic search.

The marketplaces building for this shift now will have a compounding advantage in 24 months. The ones that ignore it will find that their organic traffic has not declined in Google Search Console, but their inbound bookings have.

What Has Changed

Traditional SEO optimizes for a ranked position in a search results page. The goal is a click, then a conversion. The programmatic foundation that makes marketplaces strong in traditional search, location pages, category pages, supplier profiles built at scale, is the same foundation that feeds AI visibility.

AI search works differently. When a buyer asks an AI assistant about wedding photographers in Chicago, the system generates an answer. It may cite sources. It may recommend specific businesses. It may describe the market in a way that positions some providers as authoritative and others as unknown.

Whether your marketplace appears in that answer depends on whether the AI's training data and real-time retrieval systems recognize your content as authoritative, comprehensive, and trustworthy for that category.

Two terms describe this space:

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Structuring your content to appear in AI-generated answers and featured snippets. Getting your content referenced, quoted, or linked when an AI answers a buyer's question.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Optimizing for visibility in generative search specifically, including Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT browsing, and Perplexity. The goal is that your marketplace or your content appears as a cited source in the generated answer.

For marketplace founders, the distinction matters less than the output: buyers find you through AI, not just through a ranked link.

Why Marketplaces Are Both Vulnerable and Well-Positioned

The vulnerability: most marketplaces have weak content depth on their supply pages. Supplier profiles with thin descriptions. Category pages with no supporting copy. No educational content that explains the category to a buyer who is early in their decision.

AI systems generating answers about "how to hire a commercial photographer" draw from sources with real depth. Guides. Expert commentary. Authoritative comparison content. Thin marketplace listing pages do not make it into those answers.

The opportunity: marketplaces with rich supply data and well-structured content are sitting on more citation material than most publishers. Reviews, pricing data, category expertise, supply quality standards, buyer education content. That substance is what AI systems are looking for when they generate answers.

The gap between vulnerable and well-positioned is content depth and structure.

What AI Systems Are Looking For

When an AI generates an answer that cites sources, it is drawing on a combination of training data and real-time retrieval. Several signals influence whether your content is included.

Topical authority. Does your site have depth and breadth on the category? A marketplace that publishes one listing page for "commercial photographers" signals less authority than one that also has buyer guides, pricing context, FAQ content, and category education.

Structured data. Schema markup tells crawlers and AI systems exactly what your content represents. A supplier with structured data marked up as a LocalBusiness with reviews, services, and pricing is more parseable than a page with the same information in unstructured HTML.

Content that answers real questions. AI systems retrieve content that matches how buyers phrase questions. "What should I look for in a wedding photographer?" is a different format from a listing page. Content that directly answers buyer questions gets retrieved as answers.

Trustworthiness signals. Reviews, author expertise, established domain age, and consistent publishing history all contribute to how AI systems weight your content.

Crawlability by AI agents. The new generation of AI crawlers behaves differently from Googlebot. They request full page content, follow fewer pagination patterns, and prioritize well-structured text over JavaScript-heavy rendering.

The llms.txt Strategy

One of the most actionable steps marketplaces can take is implementing an llms.txt file.

llms.txt is a simple text file that tells AI crawlers and large language models which content on your site is worth prioritizing. It lives at your domain root: yourmarketplace.com/llms.txt.

The format lists your most important pages, ideally in plain text or Markdown, with brief descriptions of what each one contains. AI systems that respect the standard use it to understand your content hierarchy without crawling everything.

For marketplaces, a well-structured llms.txt includes:

• Your most authoritative category pages
• Buyer education guides
• Supplier quality standards and vetting information
• Key FAQ content
• Your homepage and about page

This is a low-effort, high-signal implementation. It does not take long to build and it directly communicates your content hierarchy to AI systems that are increasingly deciding what sources to cite.

Markdown and Plain-Text Content

AI systems index and cite content more effectively when it is in clean, structured formats. Markdown is the preferred format for most LLM training pipelines.

Marketplaces that make their core content available in Markdown format, not just as HTML rendered by a JavaScript framework, give AI crawlers a cleaner signal.

Practical implementations include:

• A /[page].md endpoint that returns the core content of key pages in plain Markdown
• An llms-full.txt that includes the full text of your most important content
• Structured FAQ blocks written in clean Markdown rather than JavaScript-heavy accordion components

This does not replace your existing pages. It supplements them with a format that AI crawlers handle more effectively.

Schema Markup for Marketplace Content

Schema markup in JSON-LD format directly improves how AI systems understand your content. The relevant schema types for marketplaces include:

• LocalBusiness for supplier profiles
• Service for service categories
• Review and AggregateRating for review data
• FAQPage for buyer education content
• BreadcrumbList for navigation hierarchy

Most marketplaces implement basic schema and stop there. The opportunity is depth: marking up supplier profiles with complete service descriptions, coverage areas, pricing ranges, and review aggregates tells AI systems that your supply is real, vetted, and comprehensive.

Google AI Overviews draw heavily from structured data when generating answers about local services. Marketplaces with complete schema implementation appear more reliably in those summaries.

Content Depth That Creates Citation Value

The highest-leverage content investment for AI visibility is depth, not volume.

A single comprehensive guide to "how to hire a commercial real estate photographer" that covers what to look for, what questions to ask, what price ranges to expect, and how to evaluate portfolios is more valuable than ten thin listing pages.

This content serves two purposes. It ranks in traditional search. And it becomes the source material AI systems draw on when generating answers to buyer questions.

The format matters:

• Clear headings that match how buyers phrase questions
• Bullet-pointed summaries that are easy for AI to extract
• Specific, factual content that positions your marketplace as authoritative on the category
• Internal links to your supply pages, so discovery flows from the answer to the booking

Marketplaces at the $1M to $15M GMV stage should prioritize one or two comprehensive category guides over a large volume of thin content. Depth signals authority faster than breadth.

Monitoring AI Visibility

Traditional SEO tools do not measure AI search visibility. The reporting gap is real.

Practical ways to monitor:

• Search your target queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews periodically. Are you cited? Are competitors?
• Track branded search volume in Google Search Console. If buyers are finding you through AI and then searching your brand name directly, branded search volume will increase even if organic click-through drops.
• Monitor referral traffic sources. Perplexity and some AI assistants send referral traffic that shows in analytics.
• Watch for your content being quoted or linked in AI-generated answers by searching for your content alongside category queries.

There is no clean automated dashboard for this yet. Manual monitoring is the current state.

The Early-Mover Advantage Is Real

AI search share is growing. The percentage of buyers who find service providers through AI-generated answers will be meaningfully higher in two years than it is today.

The marketplaces that establish content authority now, implement structured data now, and build their llms.txt and Markdown content infrastructure now will be cited in AI answers before their competitors build the same infrastructure. Authority compounds in both traditional and AI search.

This is not a reason to abandon traditional SEO. It is a reason to extend the same content discipline into a new distribution channel while that channel is still early.

The fundamentals are the same: authoritative content, structured data, crawlable pages, genuine depth. The implementation has new components. The compounding works the same way.

This applies across the marketplace flywheel: every improvement to content depth and structured data strengthens both traditional and AI search simultaneously. The channel is new. The mechanics are not.

For marketplace founders building an organic growth engine alongside this, the Growth and SEO service covers AEO, GEO, llms.txt, programmatic content, and the full channel strategy in one engagement.