How to get your business named when someone asks an AI

What an AI answer is made of.

When you ask one of these tools a question about a local service, it does not answer from memory. It runs a web search behind the scenes, reads a handful of pages, and writes a summary of what it found. Then it tells you where the facts came from.

That is the part worth knowing. The tool can only repeat what is written down somewhere it can read. An analysis of 6.8 million of these citations found that 44% pointed at a business’s own website, more than any other kind of source (Yext, 2025). Directories, review sites and your Google listing make up most of the rest.

So the question “how do I get into AI answers” has a plain answer: put the facts on your website, in words a machine can quote, and keep the other places where you are listed telling the same story.

Write the page as the answer.

Think of the question your customer would ask out loud, then write the page so that the first few lines answer it. Not a slogan. The answer.

Give each service its own page. A page about boiler servicing can say what it includes, how long it takes, which areas you cover, what it costs or where the price starts, and how to book. A single page that lists twelve services in one paragraph gives the tool nothing to hold on to.

Add the questions people actually ask you, with the answers you actually give. “Do you charge a call-out fee?” “Can you come on a Saturday?” “Do I need to be home?” These are the exact questions being typed into the tools, and a short, honest answer is what gets quoted.

If a stranger read only this page, could they tell what you do, where, when, and roughly what it costs?

Put your town and the places you cover in ordinary sentences. “We cover Leicester, Oadby and Wigston” tells both a person and a machine where you work. A map on its own does not.

Keep your Google listing telling the same story.

Gemini reads Google’s own business listings directly, and the other tools lean on them too. If your listing says you close at five and your website says six, the tool has to pick one, and it may pick wrong or leave you out.

Check that your name, address, phone number and hours match everywhere they appear. Choose the right main category. Add your services and a few recent photographs. The Business Profile article walks through it.

Reviews matter more here than they did before. The tools summarise them: “customers mention fast response and fair prices.” A steady trickle of honest reviews, with your replies, gives them something good to say. There is a simple way to ask that does not feel awkward.

Let the tools in.

This is the step most people never think about. A website can politely tell crawlers to stay away, and some hosts and security services now block AI crawlers by default. If yours does, the tools cannot read your pages and will never quote them.

Ask whoever looks after your site to check the robots file and the firewall settings, and to confirm that the AI crawlers from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Perplexity are allowed to read the public pages. It is a two-minute check.

Structured data, in plain words.

Behind a good local website there is a small block of code that states the facts in a fixed format: business name, type, address, phone, opening hours, the services offered, the questions and answers. People never see it. Search engines and AI tools read it first, because it leaves nothing to interpret.

You do not need to write it yourself. You need to know it should be there, and to ask for it. Every site we build includes it, connected to the same facts the page shows in words, so the two can never disagree.

Two more things that help: a page that loads quickly and shows its text without waiting for scripts, and facts kept as text rather than inside images or PDFs. A menu photographed and uploaded as a picture is invisible to every tool.

Ask the tools yourself.

The quickest way to see where you stand is to be your own customer. Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and ask the question a customer would ask, in their words, with your town in it.

Note who gets named and look at the sources the tool shows. Open those pages. Almost always they state the facts plainly near the top, have the service in the page title, and answer the obvious questions. That is the shape to copy.

Do it again in a month. These answers change as the tools re-read the web, and a clearer page shows up faster than you might expect.

• Each main service has its own page that answers what, where, when and how much.
• The questions customers ask by phone are on the site, with our real answers.
• The towns we cover are written in sentences, not only on a map.
• Name, address, phone and hours match on the website and the Google listing.
• Nothing on the site or the host is blocking AI crawlers from reading it.
• I have asked the three tools my customer’s question and looked at who they name.

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A few common questions.