Short answer: AI services mention businesses they can read, understand and trust. Let their crawlers in, answer the questions your customers ask in plain words, describe your business with structured data, and make sure the same facts about you appear elsewhere on the web.
More and more people find businesses by asking an AI instead of searching. “Which studio in Sweden makes carousels?” or “Who builds fast websites for a flat price?” This guide covers what you can do to be part of the answer. Everything described here we have done on augebitur.com.
How AI picks which businesses to mention
ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI pull information from the web when they answer questions about businesses and services. Google AI builds on Google’s regular index, while ChatGPT and Perplexity have their own crawlers. They prefer sources that are easy to read, clear, consistent and mentioned by others. At heart it is the same as good SEO, with a bit more focus on clarity and facts.
1. Let the crawlers in
If an AI service is not allowed to read your site, it cannot recommend you either. Check your robots.txt. It should allow regular search engines and the AI services’ search crawlers:
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://yourbusiness.com/sitemap.xmlOAI-SearchBot is the crawler ChatGPT uses for search. GPTBot is a different crawler that collects training data, and you can block it without disappearing from ChatGPT’s search results.
2. Answer the question in the first sentence
AI services like to lift a single sentence as the answer. So start every page, every section and every FAQ answer with the answer itself. Explain afterwards. It helps people too.
Worse: “There are many factors that affect what a website costs…” Better: “A website with us costs from €99 a month. This is how we price it…”
3. Describe your business with structured data
Structured data is code that tells machines what a page is about: who you are, where you are, what you sell and what it costs. Use schema.org in the JSON-LD format. The essentials:
- LocalBusiness or Organization: name, address, phone, area served and links to your social accounts.
- Service and Offer: your services and prices.
- FAQPage: your common questions and answers.
- BreadcrumbList: where the page sits in the structure.
4. Be consistent with name, address and phone
AI compares facts from many sources. If your business has different names, addresses or phone numbers on the site, your Google Business Profile, directories and social media, the picture gets blurry. Make them exactly the same everywhere.
5. Be concrete
Prices, places, numbers and examples are easier for an AI to repeat than vague claims. “We build websites from €99 a month for businesses in northern Sweden” is far more useful than “we offer affordable digital solutions”.
6. Get mentioned elsewhere
AI answers often cite sources other than your own site: reviews, local news, industry sites, directories and partners. Ask happy customers for reviews, make sure you are listed in relevant directories and talk about your work where your audience reads.
7. Add an llms.txt file
llms.txt is a proposed standard from 2024: a simple text file at /llms.txt that summarises what the site is about and links to the most important pages. Not every AI service uses it yet, but it costs nothing to add. See our own llms.txt as an example.
8. Make the site fast and readable without JavaScript
Not every crawler runs JavaScript. If your content only appears after a script has run, a crawler may see an empty page. Make sure the text is in the HTML itself and that the site loads fast, on phones too.
9. Test and measure
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI the same things your customers ask. Does your business come up? What do they say about you, and which sources do they cite? Also look in your analytics for visits from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai. Repeat every month and note what changes.
What not to do
- Do not stuff pages with keywords. It makes the copy worse for both people and AI.
- Do not create lots of near identical pages. Pages where only the town name changes look like spam. We removed seven of those ourselves when we rebuilt this site.
- Do not hide text. Anything you want AI to read should be visible to visitors too.
Want help? Every website we build gets all of this from the start. Read about websites in code.