Business guide
Can AI find your website? A practical discovery and content checklist
Check public access, search discovery and clear business information without relying on promises of guaranteed AI recommendations.
Finding a page is different from recommending a business
An assistant might discover a website through a search tool, follow a link or open a URL a user supplies. It may then read the page and compare the information with a particular request. Those are different steps. Seeing an assistant read a site does not reveal every source it used to find it, and a recommendation in one conversation does not establish a stable ranking.
Different products, modes and permissions can change which tools are used. Avoid assuming that one brand always ignores search rankings while another only repeats them. For your business, the practical question is whether the public site can be discovered, accessed and understood, and whether its claims give a customer a sound basis for deciding to contact you.
Check that the important pages are genuinely public
Open the site without signing in and check the main service and contact pages. A customer or crawler cannot reliably use content hidden behind an account, broken link or deployment login. Ask the provider to review indexing directives, robots rules and any firewall or bot protection that may block intended access. Do not remove security controls indiscriminately just to increase crawler traffic.
Crawler controls differ. OpenAI separates OAI-SearchBot from its training crawler, GPTBot; its user-requested ChatGPT-User visits may not follow robots.txt. Anthropic documents separate agents that honour robots.txt. Google-Extended controls some other Google AI uses, not Search crawling or AI features within Search. Review provider-specific controls rather than assuming one rule covers every use.
- Findable
Important pages have working links and the intended search access.
- Accessible
Public content loads without an unintended login or blocking rule.
- Understandable
Visible text explains services, coverage, evidence and the next step.
- Observed
Review actual referrals and enquiries without claiming guaranteed placement.
Make the business understandable in ordinary language
State what you do, where you work and who the service suits. Explain important exclusions and the information needed for a quote. Use genuine examples that the business has permission to publish. A page saying “we are the best at everything” gives a comparison tool and a human customer less useful information than a specific explanation of the work you actually accept.
Keep important information in visible text rather than relying solely on images or a decorative animation. Descriptive headings, understandable navigation and links between related guides help readers move from a question to a service. Structured data should agree with the page. Do not hide unsupported claims or keyword lists in markup in an attempt to influence an assistant.
Keep normal search fundamentals in the plan
For Google’s AI search features, Google says there are no special additional optimisation requirements beyond the relevant search foundations. Check useful public content, internal links and technical eligibility before buying a separate AI visibility promise. There is no documented special AI schema requirement for those features, and meeting the rules still does not guarantee indexing or display.
A website can support information checking even when a customer first finds the business elsewhere. Maintain the same factual phone, service and location information across the site and profiles you control. If an assistant repeats old information, check its linked source where available and correct the underlying page you own. Repeating test prompts is not a substitute for maintaining accurate business information.
- Check public page access and intended crawler settings.
- Use specific, current service and coverage information.
- Keep structured data consistent with visible content.
- Evaluate visibility claims against the relevant provider’s documentation.
Observe referrals and enquiries with appropriate limits
Google includes traffic from its Search AI features in Search Console’s overall Web performance data; that is not a report of all AI assistants. Review identifiable referrals elsewhere when available, and keep customer-reported discovery separate. A single prompt is only a sample. Compare useful patterns over time without treating missing referrals as proof that no AI-assisted visits occurred.
My website and SEO work can improve the underlying public information, navigation and measurement that support discovery. It does not include guaranteed ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Google recommendations. The goal is a site customers can understand and use when they arrive, with dependable enquiry handling so any useful visibility has a clear route into the business.