Seven Ways to Make Sure AI Assistants Can Find and Recommend Your Business

AI assistants find businesses much as search engines always have: they read pages from the open web, and they favour ones that are served ready to read, plainly written and clearly labelled. Making yours one of them is unglamorous technical housekeeping - structured data, clean markup, crawlable pages and facts stated in sentences a machine can quote. None of it guarantees a recommendation. All of it decides whether you are eligible for one.

Start with the caveat, because the field is full of people selling certainty. No one can promise that an assistant will recommend your business. The systems are numerous, they change, they weigh sources differently, and none of them publishes a ranking formula. Any agency quoting you a guaranteed result is guessing with confidence. What follows is the part that is actually within your control: being readable, being quotable, and not being accidentally invisible.

1. Serve pages that are already readable when they arrive

This is the one that decides everything else, so it comes first.

Some websites send a mostly empty page and then build the real content in the visitor's browser using JavaScript. A person does not notice - it happens in a moment. A machine reading your page may notice a great deal, because what it receives is a shell where your content should be. Search engines have got reasonably good at handling this. Assistants vary, and several are much less patient about it.

The fix is to render pages on the server, so the words exist in the page the moment it is requested. If you are having a site built, this is the single most useful question to ask about how it works. If you already have one, view the page source and search for a sentence from your homepage. If it is not in there, that is what is being fixed.

2. State your facts in plain sentences

Assistants quote. That is the mechanic - an answer is assembled from sources, and short, self-contained, factual sentences are what survive that process.

So write them. "We are a physiotherapy clinic in Palma, open Monday to Saturday, treating sports injuries and post-operative rehabilitation" is quotable. "Our journey began with a passion for movement" is not, and neither is anything phrased as a slogan. This does not mean writing without character. It means making sure that somewhere on the page the plain version exists, unwrapped, in one sentence.

The same applies to answers. If a question has a real answer - what you charge, how long it takes, whether you cover a particular area - put the answer in the first line of the paragraph, then explain around it. Burying it in the third paragraph makes it harder to lift, and a good deal harder to lift correctly.

3. Add structured data, and make it describe your business

Structured data is a small block of machine-readable information in the page, in a format called JSON-LD, stating in a standard vocabulary who you are, what you do, where you are and how to reach you. It is the difference between an assistant inferring your details from your prose and reading them stated outright.

For most businesses the useful pieces are an Organization or LocalBusiness block for the business itself, FAQPage on anything written as questions and answers, and Product, Service or Event where those apply. If your site already has structured data, it is worth checking that it actually describes the business, rather than only marking up a breadcrumb trail or a search box - that is a common state of affairs and a wasted opportunity. Older formats still linger too; JSON-LD is what modern tools read.

4. Do not accidentally lock the door

Some sites block AI crawlers, deliberately or otherwise. Publishers who sell subscriptions have reasons to. A business that would like to be recommended does not.

Two things are worth checking. First, your robots.txt file, at yourdomain.com/robots.txt: if it names AI crawlers and disallows them, that decision is being made on your behalf, sometimes by a plugin or a default setting you never chose. Second, whether important content sits behind anything a crawler cannot pass - a login, a cookie wall that blocks content until dismissed, a form gate, or an infinite scroll with no plain links underneath. Anything a machine cannot reach might as well not be published.

There is also a newer, entirely optional convention called llms.txt: a plain-text summary of your site written for assistants. It is not yet widely used and its absence costs you nothing today. It is cheap to add and worth knowing about.

5. Keep your facts identical everywhere

Assistants cross-check. When your address, phone number, opening hours or business name appear differently across your website, your Google Business Profile, your social accounts and the directories that list you, the effect is not neutral - inconsistency makes a source less confidently quotable.

This is the least technical item here and the one most often left undone. Pick the canonical version of your name, address and phone number, write it down, and make every listing match it exactly, down to whether you use "Ltd" and how the phone number is spaced. Then check the old listings you have forgotten about, because those are usually the ones disagreeing with you.

6. Give each thing you do one clear page

If your services are all crammed onto a single page, an assistant answering a question about one of them has to extract it from a page about six things, and may not. If the same service is spread over four near-identical pages, none of them is the obvious source.

One clear page per thing, at a sensible address, with a heading that names it in the words a customer would use rather than the words the industry uses. Headings should step down in order - one h1, then h2 for sections, then h3 beneath them - because that ordering is how both assistants and screen readers work out the shape of a page. Skipped levels still look fine to a visitor and make the structure harder to follow.

7. Publish the answers people actually want

The questions that get asked of an assistant are the ones people are slightly embarrassed to ask a salesperson: what does this really cost, how long will it take, what happens if it goes wrong, is this right for someone like me.

Sites that answer those questions plainly get quoted, because there is something there to quote. Sites that route every such question to a contact form contribute nothing to the answer and are not part of it. Publishing your pricing, or at least honest ranges, is the clearest example: it feels exposing and it is one of the most effective things you can do.

Where to start

In order of return: check that your pages are readable when they arrive, add structured data describing your business, make sure nothing is blocking crawlers, then work on the writing. The first three are a day of technical work and they are prerequisites - no amount of good copy compensates for a page a machine cannot read.

Our free website health check tests most of this for you: whether your pages are served ready to read, whether you have structured data and whether it describes your business, whether anything is blocking AI crawlers, and whether your headings are in order. It reads only what is already public, so you can run it on a competitor's site as easily as your own.