Straight answers about AI search

To get recommended by ChatGPT, make your business facts machine-readable and unambiguous (llms.txt, JSON-LD schema, consistent name, address, phone and services), get those same facts corroborated on third-party sources ChatGPT retrieves, and publish answer-shaped pages that respond directly to the unbranded questions your buyers ask. Then re-measure: run the same unbranded searches again to confirm ChatGPT now names you.

Your business is usually missing from AI answers for one of five reasons: AI crawlers are blocked or cannot read your site, your key facts are not machine-readable, your business data is inconsistent between your site and major listings, no independent source corroborates you, or you have no page that actually answers the question the buyer asked.

Ask each AI engine the unbranded questions your buyers actually ask - never your brand name - and record for each answer whether your business was Cited (named with a source), Named (mentioned without a source) or Not Found. Repeat across all seven major engines, because they disagree with each other, and repeat monthly, because their answers change.

llms.txt is a plain-text Markdown file placed at the root of your domain (yoursite.com/llms.txt) that gives AI models a concise, curated map of your most important factual pages. It works like a sitemap written for large language models, and it is one of the fastest technical AEO wins available because it removes guesswork about what your business is and which pages state your facts.

SEO optimises to rank a link on a results page so a user clicks it. AEO - Answer Engine Optimization - optimises to be named and cited inside the answer an AI generates, where there may be no links at all. They share a technical foundation, but AEO adds machine-readable facts, answer-shaped pages and structured data written so a model can quote you with confidence. AEO does not replace SEO; it sits on top of it.

To appear in Google AI Overviews, make sure Google can index you, do not block Google-Extended, structure pages so the complete answer to a specific question sits in the first two sentences under a question-shaped heading, add FAQPage and Organization schema, and keep your business facts current and consistent with your Google Business Profile.

At minimum, publish JSON-LD for Organization (or LocalBusiness if you serve a location), Service or Product for what you sell, FAQPage for your questions and answers, Article or TechArticle for substantive guides, and BreadcrumbList for hierarchy. Link them with stable @id values so engines read one connected entity, and make every fact in the markup identical to what a human sees on the page.

Edit robots.txt to explicitly allow the AI crawlers you want to be visible to - GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User for OpenAI, ClaudeBot and Claude-User for Anthropic, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended for Gemini and AI Overviews, CCBot for Common Crawl, Applebot-Extended, Bytespider and Amazonbot - then verify the file returns HTTP 200 and that your key facts exist in the served HTML rather than only after JavaScript runs.

You cannot edit an AI model, so you fix the sources it reads. Capture the exact wrong statement and which engine made it, correct your own site so it states the fact unambiguously and consistently, claim and correct your Google Business Profile, Bing Places and Apple Business Connect, update the directories and data aggregators carrying the stale record, then re-ask the same question weeks later to confirm the correction propagated.

AI share of voice is the percentage of relevant buyer answers in which an engine names your brand versus each competitor. Track it by fixing a set of unbranded buyer questions, running the identical set across every engine on a regular schedule, recording which brands are named in each answer, and reporting your named count as a share of all brand mentions. The question set must stay fixed or the trend is meaningless.