AI search and your website: how to be the business it names

Someone in Wymondham types “who can fix a leaking flat roof near me, and do they work weekends?” A couple of years ago they’d have got a page of links and picked one. Now there’s a good chance they get a written answer first, with three or four businesses named in it and a few links underneath. If you’re not one of the names, you may not get a look at all.

That answer comes from Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode, both available in the UK, or from tools like ChatGPT search and Perplexity, which people use in much the same way. They don’t make up the businesses they recommend. They read what’s already published about you and summarise it.

So the question for a small business is a practical one: what are they reading, and does it say the right things?

What these answers draw on

Mostly the same material ordinary search uses. Google states that there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, and the usual basics apply. Its guidance also tells owners to keep their Business Profile information up to date.

For a local business, that usually means:

• your own website, page by page;
• your Google Business Profile, including hours, categories and photos;
• reviews, on Google and elsewhere;
• directories and listings that mention you, such as trade bodies, local guides and booking sites.

ChatGPT search reads the web too. OpenAI runs a crawler called OAI-SearchBot for it, and a site that blocks that crawler in its robots.txt file won’t appear in ChatGPT’s search answers. If your site was set up years ago with blanket bot blocking, check it.

Answer the questions people ask

People ask these tools full questions, not two-word keywords. Google describes a “query fan-out” approach, where one question is split into several related searches and the results are combined. The person asking about weekend roof repairs in Wymondham is in effect asking whether you do flat roofs, whether you cover Wymondham and whether you work Saturdays.

A site that says “Quality roofing solutions across the region” answers none of those. Write the plain facts down where a reader, or a machine reading on their behalf, can find them:

• What you do, service by service, in the words customers use. “Flat roof repairs”, not “membrane solutions”.
• Where you work, naming towns and villages rather than just “Norfolk and surrounding areas”.
• When, including weekends, evenings and how quickly you can usually come out.
• The awkward questions you get asked on the phone every week, with straight answers.

A short page for each main service tends to do better than one page listing everything. Our local SEO guide goes through how to set those pages up for Norwich and Norfolk.

Say it the same way everywhere

Suppose your website says you open at eight, Google says nine and an old directory still has your previous phone number. A summary of you will either hedge or repeat the wrong one. Pick one version of each fact (business name, address, phone number, hours, service area) and make every listing match it. Check them again whenever something changes.

Structured data helps. It’s a small block of code in the page that states your name, address, phone number and opening hours in a format machines read without guessing, and Google’s LocalBusiness markup covers exactly that. Google’s own documentation adds two cautions: the markup has to match what’s visible on the page, and it doesn’t guarantee any special treatment in results.

Keep your Google profile right

For local questions, your Business Profile is often the first thing an AI answer leans on. Check your categories, your hours (bank holidays too), your service areas and the description. Add recent photos. Reply to reviews, since review text is public and gets read like everything else. Our Google Business Profile guide covers each setting.

Fewer clicks, but being named still counts

Some searches that used to send someone to your site will now end on the results page. If the answer already says you open at eight and cover Dereham, the person may just ring you. That shows up as fewer visits in your analytics while the phone rings as often as before. Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is counted inside the normal Web figures in Search Console, so you won’t see it as a separate line.

What matters is being one of the names. A business that isn’t mentioned doesn’t get the call.

A small extra: llms.txt

Our own site publishes a file at /llms.txt. It’s a plain text summary of the site and its main pages, written for language models to read, following a convention proposed at llmstxt.org. It takes a few minutes to keep current and some tools may use it. It isn’t a ranking factor, and it isn’t a standard Google uses: Google’s guidance says you don’t need new machine readable files or AI text files to appear in its AI features. Treat it as optional, and only once the basics above are done.

If you’d like us to look at how your business reads to these tools, get in touch.