Your next customer might ask ChatGPT, not Google
Something quietly changed in how people find businesses. Instead of typing keywords into Google and clicking through ten results, more and more people ask an AI assistant a full question — 'who can build me a website that works in French and English?' — and get one direct answer. If your business isn't in that answer, you were never in the running.
How an AI picks who to recommend
AI assistants read the open web, much like Google's crawler, but they answer in sentences instead of links. To mention you, they need three things: to be able to read your site at all, to understand plainly what you do and where, and to find your claims consistent everywhere they look.
Making your site AI-readable
- Plain answers on real pages: an FAQ that answers cost, timing and process questions is gold — it's exactly the format AI quotes.
- Structured data: invisible labels in the code that tell machines 'this is a service', 'this is the price policy', 'this is the area we serve'.
- An llms.txt file: a new convention — a plain summary of your business at your site's root, written for AI assistants.
- No blocking: some sites accidentally tell AI crawlers to go away. That's opting out of being recommended.
SEO made you findable. AI-visibility makes you quotable.
This is now part of how we build every site — it's the 'SEO & AI Visibility' service on our list. If you're curious whether an AI can actually read your current site, our free audit includes exactly that check.