Four things decide it: the AI crawlers have to be allowed to read your site, your text has to be in the HTML rather than assembled in the browser, your business facts have to be in structured data, and you have to be mentioned somewhere other than your own website. The last one carries the most weight and is the one nearly everybody skips — models answer from consensus, so a business that appears in no directory, list or forum thread is not a candidate no matter how good its own site is.
A growing share of "who does X near me" is now typed into an assistant rather than a search box. The answer comes back as two or three named businesses with no list of ten below it, so being one of the named ones matters more than a page-one ranking ever did.
The mechanics are not mysterious, and most of them overlap with ordinary search. But two of them are genuinely different, and they are the two that decide it.
Are you blocking the AI crawlers?
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI answers each read the web with a named crawler — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended among them. A great many sites block them, usually because somebody switched on a setting during the 2023 panic about AI scraping and never revisited it.
It is one line in a file and it is invisible from the front of the site. If you check one thing on this page, check this one — the free website check reports it, or open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for those names.
Can a machine read your page without running it?
Crawlers largely take the HTML as sent. If your text is assembled in the browser by JavaScript, what arrives is close to an empty page — and no amount of good writing survives that, because none of it was received.
This is the single most consequential technical fact about a small business website in 2026, and it is decided by whatever built the site rather than by anything you write.
Are your facts in structured data?
Structured data is the machine-readable version of what you are: name, address, hours, what you sell, what it costs. It is how you stop being a string of words on a page and become an entity a model can be confident about.
The practical version for a small business is short: mark up the business itself, the opening hours, the services with prices, and the questions and answers on your pages. Hours especially — "open now" in search and maps is driven by marked-up hours, not by the hours you typed into a footer.
Are you mentioned anywhere other than your own site?
This is the part that decides it, and it happens off your website entirely. Models synthesise an answer out of what many sources appear to agree on. If nobody but you has ever written your business name, there is no consensus to draw on, and you are not in the running.
- Directories and listings for your trade and your city. Tedious, one-time, disproportionately effective because they are read constantly.
- Reviews on Google and anywhere else your trade is reviewed. Volume and recency both count.
- Forum and community threads where somebody asks for a recommendation and gets a real answer. Answer honestly and mention yourself only where it is genuinely relevant.
- "Best X in [city]" lists. Many accept submissions. Being on ten of them changes what every model believes about your city.
Keep your name, address and phone number identical everywhere. Contradictions between listings do not average out — they dissolve the entity, and the model stops being sure you are one business rather than three.
How do you write a page an assistant will quote?
Assume every paragraph will be read alone, with nothing around it. That means naming the thing rather than saying "we" or "our service", and putting the specific number in the same sentence as what it refers to.
"We offer competitive rates" cannot be quoted by anybody. "Marina Shine cleans a two-bedroom apartment in Dubai for AED 220" can be quoted, and will be. Ask the question as a heading and answer it in the first two sentences underneath.
What about llms.txt?
It is a proposed file for telling AI systems about your site. It takes twenty minutes and does no harm, adoption is thin, and Google ignores it. Add it if you like; do not mistake it for a strategy. Everything above matters more.
Questions people actually ask
- How do I know if ChatGPT can see my website?
- Check your robots.txt for GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, and confirm your page text is in the HTML rather than built in the browser. The [free website check](tools/website-check) reports both. Asking ChatGPT about your business is not a reliable test — it may answer from other sources or from training data rather than from your site.
- Is GEO different from SEO?
- It overlaps heavily. Readable text, structured data and being genuinely useful serve both. What differs is the weight: AI answers lean harder on being mentioned by third parties and on passages that can be quoted standing alone, and they have no page two to be on.
- Should I block AI crawlers to protect my content?
- If your business is selling content, that is a real argument. If your business is selling cleaning, or dinner, or a fit-out, blocking them removes you from answers your customers are already asking for, and protects nothing you were making money from.
- How long does it take to show up in AI answers?
- The technical fixes take effect as soon as the crawlers return, typically days to weeks. Being mentioned by other sites is slower — a few months of directories, reviews and genuine participation before it shows.