Most advice about getting found by AI treats "AI search" as one thing to optimize for. In a test run on October 19, 2026, across 15 local searches in 15 US cities, it split into two different jobs depending on how the question was asked, and each one gets fixed differently.
Type something like "plumber austin" into Google and you get the three-listing map pack you'd expect. Across all 15 searches in the test, that happened 15 of 15 times when the question was typed. Ask it the way you'd actually say it out loud instead, and the map pack showed up only 9 of 15 times, while an AI Overview went from 3 of 15 to 9 of 15. Nothing about the business changed. Just the phrasing did.
The questions themselves split into two kinds, and each gets answered by a different system. "Find" questions, like whether there's an emergency vet open right now, pulled a map pack and no AI Overview in every one of the test's five examples. "Know" questions, like how much it costs to fix an AC unit, mostly triggered an AI Overview instead, and that Overview usually cited the local business's own site more often than a directory like Angi or Yelp, which still turned up sometimes.
That split is the practical takeaway. If customers mostly ask "is there a good one near me," the fix is the profile: match your name, address and phone exactly across Google, your website, Apple Maps, Bing Places and Yelp, since the model is really just trying to confirm your listings describe one real business.
If customers ask "how much" or "how long" before they call, the fix is a page, not a profile. Put the actual number in the first two sentences. In the test, ChatGPT gave general advice instead of naming any business for the five how-much and how-to questions it was asked.
Reviews do some of this work too, but only the specific ones. "Great service, highly recommend" gives a model nothing to repeat. A review that names the service, the neighborhood and the outcome hands it a sentence it can basically reuse.
RankControl, an AI SEO and AEO platform, built the test behind this. RankControl's free AI Visibility Checker shows whether ChatGPT cites your site at all, a faster way to see which of the two questions above you should actually be working on first.
Full write-up, with the typed-vs-spoken numbers: the Medium post.