Your buyers have a new habit. Some of them now ask an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity for a shortlist of suppliers, and many more read the AI-written summary at the top of a search results page without clicking anything below it.
So the CEO’s question is fair: how do we show up in those answers? Part of the honest reply is that much is unknown. The rest is unglamorous work you can start this month.
What is known and what is not
Here is what can be said with reasonable confidence.
AI assistants produce answers in two broad ways. Sometimes they answer from what they absorbed in training, which is a snapshot of the web that can be a long way out of date. Sometimes they search the web live, read a handful of pages, and write a summary with links to sources. The AI summaries inside search engines work in the second way and draw on the search engine’s own index.
Here is what is not known.
- Exactly how any given system chooses which sources to read and which to cite. The companies do not publish it.
- How stable the results are. The same question asked twice can return different answers and different sources.
- How much any individual tactic contributes.
Treat any precise claim about how to rank in AI answers as a guess, including the confident ones.
What follows is the work that makes sense under that uncertainty, because it also helps ordinary search and ordinary human visitors.
Write pages that answer real questions
Look at your service pages. Many are written in the language of brochures: “tailored solutions”, “a partner you can trust”. Nothing there can be quoted in reply to “who does commercial roof repairs near Farnborough and what does it involve?”
Rewrite with these in mind:
- State plainly what you do, for whom, and where. In the first paragraph, in a sentence a stranger would understand.
- Answer the questions buyers ask. Go through your sales call notes. How long does it take, what affects the cost, what goes wrong? Each is a heading and a direct answer.
- Put the answer first, then the detail.
- Be specific. Generic copy looks like every other site’s, and a summary has no reason to pick yours.
- Show who is behind it. Named authors, real experience, how to contact you.
| Vague | Usable |
|---|---|
| “We offer flexible maintenance packages to suit every need.” | “We service commercial boilers across Hampshire and Surrey. A standard annual service takes around half a day on site.” |
(That example is invented for illustration. Yours should be true.)
If your site has no page for a question your market asks, no amount of tuning will make you the answer to it. Finding those gaps is the purpose of our Search Visibility report.
Make sure machines can read the page
- Check your content is in the page itself. Some sites build their text with JavaScript after loading, and not every crawler runs JavaScript reliably. Ask your developer: “Is our main content present in the page’s HTML when it first loads?”
- Check your robots.txt. This file, at
yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt, tells crawlers what they may access. Some sites block AI crawlers, on purpose or because a plugin did it by default. Blocking them and wanting to be cited are incompatible aims, so decide deliberately. - Keep key facts out of images and PDFs. Prices, service areas and specifications should be text on a page.
- Stay indexed in normal search. AI summaries in search engines draw on the search index. The technical SEO checklist covers how to check.
Keep your business details consistent
AI systems build a picture of your company from many places, not only your website. If those places disagree, the picture is blurred.
Run this audit:
- Write down the canonical version of your company name, address, phone number, website address and a one-sentence description of what you do.
- Search for your company and list everywhere it appears: your Google Business Profile, other map listings, LinkedIn, industry directories, trade body membership lists, review sites, Companies House.
- Correct every one that differs. Old addresses, former trading names and dead phone numbers are common.
- Make the one-sentence description broadly the same everywhere.
Dull, and worth doing. It helps local search too.
Earn mentions from credible third parties
When someone asks an assistant for the best suppliers of something, the answer tends to draw on pages that list and compare suppliers: directories, review sites, trade press, “best of” articles, forum threads. Other people saying you are good carries more weight than your own site saying so.
Sensible ways to earn that:
- Trade body and accreditation listings. Make sure you are in them, with a full profile.
- Reviews on the platforms your buyers use. Ask happy customers, routinely.
- Trade press and local press. Offer something useful: a comment, a how-to, your own data.
- Partners and suppliers. Case studies on their sites that name you.
Avoid paying for bulk placements on sites nobody reads.
Add structured data, with modest expectations
Structured data is labelling in a page’s code that states what things are: this is an organisation, this is its address, this is a product, this is a question and answer.
Whether AI assistants give it direct weight is not something anyone outside can confirm. It is still worth having, because it removes ambiguity for the search systems that many AI answers rely on, and it is cheap. Ask your developer for organisation or local business markup at minimum, and check it with Google’s Rich Results Test.
You may also hear about a proposed file called llms.txt, intended as a guide for AI systems. Adding one does no harm, but its effect is unproven, so do not let it jump ahead of the work above.
Check where you stand
Write ten questions a buyer might ask: some naming your category and location, some describing a problem you solve, a couple asking directly about your company. Ask each in two or three assistants. Record whether you appear, who appears instead, which sources are cited, and whether what is said about you is correct.
Repeat quarterly, and expect variation between runs. You are looking for patterns: sources that keep appearing where you are absent, or wrong facts about you that trace back to a stale listing.
Be wary of guarantees
A market has formed around this anxiety, with new acronyms and packages promising to get you “ranked in AI”. Some of the work on offer is sound. The promise is the problem.
Nobody selling these services controls the AI systems, can see how they choose sources, or can prevent them changing tomorrow. So:
- Walk away from guaranteed placement or guaranteed citations.
- Ask what will be done, specifically, and whether you would want it done anyway.
- Be suspicious of anything involving hidden text, mass-produced pages or content written for machines and not for people. That is AI slop with a new label, and it damages you with human readers.
- Ask how results will be measured, given the answers vary each time.
A line you can give your CEO: “Nobody can guarantee we appear in AI answers. What we can do is make sure that when these systems go looking, they find clear, accurate, consistent information about us, on our site and elsewhere. That is the plan.”
If you want help working out which questions your site has nothing to say about, that is what we do, and a person checks the work before it reaches you.