How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT and Google AI answers?
There is no form to fill out. AI tools answer from pages they can read on the open web. You improve your odds by letting their crawlers into your site, stating your facts in plain sentences, answering the questions customers ask, and keeping your business details the same everywhere they appear.
Let the crawlers in
Each AI company sends a program to read websites. OpenAI's is called GPTBot, Anthropic's is ClaudeBot and Perplexity's is PerplexityBot. If your site turns them away, they have nothing to quote.
Check in one minute. Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see one of those names followed by "Disallow: /", that crawler is locked out. Some hosting and security services also have a switch that blocks AI crawlers, so look in those settings too.
We tested nine sites we manage by visiting each one the way those crawlers do. All nine let them in, which is what you want to see on yours.
Put your facts in words
An AI tool cannot read your price off a photo of a flyer. Write the facts as sentences on the page:
- What you do, service by service
- The towns and counties you work in
- Your hours and your phone number
- What it costs, or what the price depends on
- Your license and how long you have been in business
Vague pages get vague mentions. "We offer quality solutions" tells a machine nothing. "We install septic systems in Ravalli County" is something it can repeat.
Answer the questions people ask
People type full questions into AI tools. How much does a gravel driveway cost? Do I need a permit to clear land? A page that asks the question in a heading and answers it in the next two sentences is easy to quote.
Start with the ten questions you answer on the phone every week. Put a short answer first, then the detail. A question and answer section at the bottom of each service page works well, and marking it up as FAQ schema makes it easier for machines to read. Whoever built your site can add that.
Keep your details the same everywhere
Your business name, phone number and service area should match on your website, your Google Business Profile, Facebook and any directory that lists you. When two sources disagree, a tool has to guess which one is right, and it might guess wrong or skip you.
Reviews count here too. A profile with recent reviews that mention the work you did gives every tool more to go on.
About llms.txt
You may hear that you need a file called llms.txt. It is a proposed way to give AI tools a plain summary of your site. No major AI company has said it uses the file. We add one to the sites we build because it takes minutes, and we do not promise anything from it.
Check whether it is working
Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the question your customer would ask, with your trade and your town. Do it every month or so. The answers change, so one result does not tell you much.
Google gives you a real number. Search Console now has a report on generative AI features that shows how often each page appeared in them. On one site we built, the home page had 160 of those appearances in three months.