How to get your business cited by AI assistants
A growing share of your customers no longer scroll ten blue links. They ask an assistant a question in plain English and take the two or three names it gives them. If your business isn't in that answer, you weren't in the running. This is the new version of being on page two.
The good news is that what an AI assistant rewards is mostly what a careful human customer rewards. The bad news is that most small-business websites give it nothing to work with.
What the assistant is actually reading
It reads your pages the way a fast, literal, slightly impatient reader would. It wants to know, without guessing: what you do, where, for whom, how much, and why anyone should believe you. It also reads the structured data behind the page, the labels that tell a machine "this is a business, this is its address, these are its hours, this is a review."
The things that get you named
- A plain statement of what you do and where, in the words a customer uses, near the top of the page. "We repair pools in Palm Desert and the surrounding valley" beats "premier aquatic solutions."
- Structured data on every page: your business, your services, your reviews, your FAQ, marked up so a machine can read them without interpreting.
- Real answers to real questions. A page that answers "how much does a pool heater cost to install" in a paragraph gets cited. A page that says "contact us for a quote" does not.
- Reviews, recent and specific. Assistants weigh what other people said about you, the same way a customer does.
- A profile that matches everywhere: same name, address and phone on your site, on Google, on every directory. Mismatches make a machine unsure, and unsure means skipped.
The things that get you skipped
- Vague copy. Superlatives with no nouns.
- A site that only works with the images loaded, or a page that's one big graphic.
- No mention of where you actually are.
- Blocking the crawlers. Some sites still tell AI bots to go away in robots.txt. That's a choice, but know you're making it.
Where to start
- Rewrite the first paragraph of your homepage so a stranger could repeat what you do and where in one sentence.
- Add structured data for your business, services and reviews. This is an afternoon of work for someone who's done it before, and it's included in every plan we sell.
- Write one page that answers the question you get asked most, fully, with a price range.
- Ask an assistant about your business by name. Then ask it for a recommendation in your category and city. Do both monthly and watch it change.
The Growth Score checks your structured data and your plain-language clarity as part of its nine areas. It's free, and it'll tell you where you stand before you spend an afternoon on it.