Before AI recommends a business, it runs a quiet background check: can I read your site, do I understand exactly what you do and where, do trusted third parties agree you're good, and do the facts about you match everywhere I look? Most businesses fail that check on technicalities they've never heard of. This checklist is the fix list.
Unblock the AI crawlers in robots.txt
Check yourdomain.com/robots.txt for lines blocking GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended. Many sites block these without knowing it, because a plugin or an old developer decision turned them away at the door.
Why AI cares: if its crawler can't read your site, you don't exist. This is the single most common and most fatal mistake.
Add LocalBusiness schema to your homepage
Schema is structured data: a machine-readable label that says "this is a roofing company, here's the service area, here are the hours, here's the phone number." Without it, AI has to guess from your marketing copy.
Why AI cares: schema turns your business from a blob of text into verifiable facts AI can classify and repeat with confidence.
Make your name, address, and phone identical everywhere
Your Google listing says "Summit Roofing LLC," your website footer says "Summit Roofing & Exteriors," and an old directory has your previous phone number. To a human that's trivia. To AI it's three businesses that might not be the same one.
Why AI cares: AI cross-references sources before it commits to a recommendation. Mismatches read as uncertainty, and uncertain businesses don't get recommended.
Claim all three map profiles, not just Google
Google Business Profile gets all the attention, but ChatGPT leans on Bing's index, and Apple Business Connect feeds Siri and Apple Maps. Most businesses have claimed one of the three.
Why AI cares: each AI platform pulls local data from different sources. Missing profiles means missing from that platform's answers entirely.
Publish a page that answers the exact question buyers ask
Buyers ask AI things like "how much does a roof replacement cost in Denver" and "who's the best injury lawyer near me for a car accident." If no page on your site answers that question directly, AI quotes someone who does.
Why AI cares: AI prefers sources that answer the question asked, in the first paragraph, with specifics. It's assembling an answer, and it borrows from whoever already wrote one.
Add a real FAQ with FAQ schema
A good FAQ is prewritten answer material in exactly the shape AI wants to lift. A bad FAQ ("Why choose us?") is wasted markup.
Why AI cares: question-and-answer pairs marked up with FAQ schema are the easiest content on the internet for an answer engine to extract and cite.
Get review volume moving, then respond to everything
A 4.8 average from 12 reviews two years ago loses to a 4.6 from 300 reviews with 15 this month. Freshness and volume both signal that a business is alive and trusted.
Why AI cares: reviews are the closest thing AI has to third-party ground truth about quality. Recommendation answers lean on them heavily, and often quote them.
Publish an llms.txt file
llms.txt is a plain-text file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that describes your business for AI systems: what you do, where, for whom, at what price range. It's the new-school companion to robots.txt.
Why AI cares: it's a direct, unambiguous statement of what your business is, in the format AI tools increasingly check first.
Audit what AI currently says about you, then fix the lies
Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini: "Tell me about [your business] in [your city]." You will find wrong phone numbers, dead addresses, services you don't offer, and sometimes a confusion with a similarly named company.
Why AI cares: it doesn't. It repeats what its sources say. Which means every wrong fact traces to a source you can hunt down and correct.
Show up in the sources AI already trusts
Every industry has directories and publications AI leans on: legal directories for law firms, healthgrades-style sites for practices, trade associations for contractors, review platforms for everyone.
Why AI cares: a recommendation is safer to make when multiple independent trusted sources agree. Each quality listing is a vote.
Put quotable specifics on your site
"Serving the area for years with quality you can trust" gives AI nothing. "Serving Denver since 2009, 2,400 roofs replaced, licensed and insured in Colorado, most replacements done in two days" gives it four facts worth repeating.
Why AI cares: answer engines quote specifics because specifics sound like answers. Vague marketing copy is invisible to them.
Re-run your prompts every month and track the movement
AI answers shift as models update and sources change. The businesses that win treat AI visibility like a metric, and you can't manage what you check once and forget.
Why AI cares: consistency compounds. The signals you build in items 1 through 11 strengthen each month they stay clean, and slippage shows up early if you're watching.
Want to know your starting score?
We'll run the prompts your buyers actually use across six AI platforms and send you the full report with your AI Search Score. Free, within one business day.
Keep this handy: print it or save it as a PDF. Every item stays true as long as you maintain it.