01
An AI facts page
One page with your verified facts: name, services, service area, licensing details, hours, contact, with a visible "checked" date. Assistants and journalists quote it.
Search · AI search
Getting your business named in AI answers
The short answer
How AI assistants decide which business to name
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews mostly name the businesses that already show up well in search and describe themselves clearly in plain text: good SEO, a correct Google Business Profile, and pages that answer questions directly. There's no secret file or trick that makes them pick you, and anyone who says otherwise is guessing.
It's worth doing now because your customers have started asking. BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey (February 2026, 1,002 US adults) found 45% use ChatGPT or other AI tools for local recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier.
What's proven and what isn't
The honest state of AI search, October 2026
This field changes monthly. Here's what the sources say today.
| Tactic | What the evidence says | What we do |
|---|---|---|
| Normal SEO | Google says its AI features are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems" (Google's AI features guide, updated 2026-07-10) | The foundation. Done first. |
| Google Business Profile | The same Google guide says Business Profiles can help local businesses appear in AI responses | Set up by the rules (local SEO) |
| Original, first-hand content | Google recommends it over summaries of what's already online | Written from your jobs, your prices, your area |
| llms.txt file | Google says Search ignores it. Ahrefs log data for May 2026 found 97% of llms.txt files got zero requests (PPC Land, 2026-07-02) | Included because it costs little and some agents read it. Never sold as a ranking factor. |
| Special AI schema or Markdown copies | Google: "there's no special schema.org markup you need to add" | Normal, correct schema only |
| Chopping pages into tiny chunks | Google lists it as unnecessary | We don't |
| Allowing AI crawlers | Assistants can't quote pages they're blocked from. OpenAI documents its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, on its bots page | Allowed by default; your choice, recorded |
No one can guarantee that an AI assistant will name your business. Answers change from one day to the next and from one person to the next. What we can do is make your facts easy to find and quote, and measure the results every month, misses included. To put an assistant on your own website, answering only from your content, see the AI Site Assistant.
What you get
AI Visibility Setup
A one-time job that makes your site easy for assistants to read and quote correctly.
02
Answer-first rewrites
Your top 10 pages rewritten so the first two sentences answer the question the page is for, in plain text in the page source.
03
Files and crawler policy
llms.txt and llms-full.txt, schema upgraded, and a written decision on which AI crawlers may read the site.
04
A baseline scorecard
20 questions your customers ask, put to six assistants: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Copilot and Claude. Who got named, you or a competitor.
The Care + Search plan repeats the scorecard every month and fixes the page that should have been quoted each time you're missed. We hold ourselves to the same scorecard, misses included; the scoring method is on /proof/ai/.
Use this yourself
Run your own AI-answer scorecard
Twenty minutes, once a month. Use a private or signed-out window so past chats don't skew the answer.
- Write 10 questions a customer would really ask: "Who repairs tile roofs in [your county]?", "Best pool builder near [your town]?", "How much does a new AC unit cost in [your city]?"
- Ask each one, word for word, in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google (look for the AI Overview or AI Mode).
- For each answer, write down: were you named, were you linked, were your details right, and who was named instead.
- Where a competitor was named, open their site. Usually they have a clear page answering that exact question. That's your fix.
- Where your details were wrong, find where the wrong fact came from (an old listing, an old page) and correct it there.
- Repeat next month with the same questions, so the trend means something.
Prices
AI search prices
AI Visibility Setup
Make your site easy for AI assistants to read and quote correctly.
$1,500
- llms.txt, llms-full.txt and an AI facts page
- Top 10 pages rewritten answer-first
- AI-crawler and Content-Signal policy
- Schema upgrade
- Baseline scorecard: 20 questions across 6 assistants
Care + Search
Care plus steady search work every month.
$490/month
- Everything in Care
- 2 SEO articles and 4 Business Profile posts a month
- Review-response drafts
- Monthly long-query mining and AI-answer scorecard
- 2 hours of improvements and a monthly report
- First month free with any build
- 3-month minimum, then month-to-month
FAQ
AI search questions
Is AI search replacing Google?
Not for local services today. In BrightLocal's 2026 survey, Google was still the top place people looked for local businesses, with AI tools third behind Google and Facebook, and Google's AI Overviews sit inside Google results anyway. AI tools are growing fast as a second place people ask, so it makes sense to be ready for both.
What exactly does the AI Visibility Setup include?
An llms.txt file, an llms-full.txt file and an AI facts page; your top 10 pages rewritten answer-first; an AI-crawler policy; a schema upgrade; and a baseline scorecard of 20 questions across 6 assistants. Whether you need llms.txt at all is covered in our guide to AI answers.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend me?
No. No one controls what an assistant says, and answers vary between users and days. We make your facts clear and consistent everywhere, and we measure each month whether you're being named.
Why is AI saying something wrong about my business?
Assistants repeat what they find: an old directory listing, an old phone number, a page that was never updated. The fix is to correct the source and make one clear facts page that says the right thing.
Is this different from normal SEO?
Mostly no, and Google says the same. The extras are the facts page, the answer-first writing, the crawler policy and the scorecard that tells you if it's working.
Next step
See how search engines read your site today.
The X-ray shows Google's own scores for your site in about a minute. A scoping call turns them into a plan.