To be recommended by an AI assistant, your business needs to be easy to understand, easy to verify and clearly the answer to a specific question. That means publishing plain, factual pages, marking them up so machines can read them, and being mentioned accurately in places beyond your own site. There is no trick, and nobody can guarantee a placement.
Here is what we know actually helps, and what is hype.
How assistants decide what to recommend
Tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI answers draw on two things: what they learned in training, and what they fetch from the web when you ask. When they fetch, they behave like a fast researcher: they look for clear, quotable answers and favour sources that appear trustworthy and consistent.
You can see this in server logs. Our own logs show regular visits from OpenAI’s, Anthropic’s and Perplexity’s crawlers, along with user-triggered fetches that happen when a real person asks an assistant a question that touches the site. Assistants are reading business websites. The question is whether yours gives them something worth quoting.
What helps
1. State plainly what you do, for whom, and where. Put it near the top of your home page in one or two sentences. Vague slogans give an assistant nothing to quote.
2. Publish your prices, or ranges. Pages with real numbers are cited far more readily than “contact us for a quote.” Assistants are frequently asked “how much does X cost?” If you publish an answer, you can be the source.
3. Answer real questions directly. Write pages and posts titled the way people ask. Start with the answer in the first paragraph, then explain. This is the format assistants can lift cleanly.
4. Use structured data. Schema markup (Organization, Service, FAQ, Article) tells machines what each page is. It does not guarantee anything, but it removes ambiguity.
5. Add an llms.txt file. This is a plain-text summary of your site, served at /llms.txt, written for AI systems. It is not a formal standard that every assistant honours, but it costs almost nothing and is fetched by crawlers.
6. Keep facts consistent everywhere. Name, address, services and prices should match across your website, Google Business Profile and directories. Contradictions lower trust.
7. Be unambiguous about who you are. If similar business names exist, say which you are, and which you are not.
8. Get mentioned elsewhere. Assistants weigh what other sources say about you. Reviews, directory listings, trade bodies and local press all count. This is the slowest step and often the most valuable.
Do not block the crawlers you want
Check your robots.txt. If you want to be cited, allow the search and user-agent crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. Training crawlers are a separate decision. Blocking them is a legitimate choice, but it is a choice.
What does not work
- Keyword stuffing. Assistants read meaning, not density.
- Fabricated reviews or claims. They get cross-checked and damage trust.
- Mass-produced thin pages. Volume without substance is ignored.
- Paying for “guaranteed AI rankings.” Nobody controls these systems.
How to measure it
Ask the assistants directly. Once a month, put the questions your customers ask into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google, and record whether you are mentioned and what is said. In analytics, watch for visits with a referrer or utm_source from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and similar. Numbers are small today, but they show direction.
Where to start this week
- Rewrite your home page opening to say what you do, for whom and where.
- Publish your prices or price ranges.
- Add an FAQ answering your five most common questions.
- Check
robots.txtand addllms.txt. - Claim and complete your Google Business Profile.
This overlaps heavily with good traditional SEO, which is the point. For the Google side, read how to get your business found on Google in the UK. If you would like help, our SEO and AI search service covers both, and a free website review shows where your site stands today.