Search is changing faster than most people realise. A growing number of customers no longer scroll through Google, they ask an AI assistant: “Who’s a good electrician near me?” or “Find me a reliable gardener in the Peak District.” The assistant gives a short answer with a few names. If you’re one of them, you get the call. If you’re not, you don’t even know you missed it.
So how do you become a business that AI assistants recommend? It’s surprisingly close to good old SEO, with a few twists.
1. Be readable to a machine, not just a human
AI assistants read the open web. They favour pages that are clear, factual and well-structured, plain statements of what you do, where you work, and how to reach you. A site that’s mostly images, slow to load, or buried in marketing fluff is hard for them to parse and easy to skip.
2. Use structured data
Behind the scenes, structured data (called schema markup) describes your business to machines in a format they parse instantly: your name, services, prices, area served and opening hours. It’s invisible to visitors but it’s exactly what an AI reads to understand and cite you accurately. Every site we build includes it as standard, more on our SEO & AI page.
3. Answer the actual questions customers ask
AI assistants love clear answers to real questions: “How much does a boiler service cost?”, “Do you cover Bakewell?”, “Are you Gas Safe registered?” A page or FAQ that answers these directly is the kind of thing an assistant quotes word for word. Vague copy gives it nothing to work with.
4. Keep your details consistent everywhere
Just like Google, AI assistants trust businesses whose name, address and phone number match across the web. Inconsistency makes them unsure, and an unsure AI leaves you out. (This is the same discipline that helps you rank on Google.)
5. Let the AI crawlers in
Some sites accidentally block the crawlers that AI assistants use to read the web. The fix is a small technical setting that explicitly welcomes them, something many websites still get wrong. Ours are configured to welcome ChatGPT’s, Claude’s, Perplexity’s and Google’s AI crawlers from day one.
Why this is good news for small businesses
You can’t buy your way to the top of an AI’s recommendation the way you can buy ads. What wins is being clear, honest and well-structured, which a small local business can do just as well as a national chain. For once, the playing field tilts your way.
The catch is that getting all of this right, structured data, machine-readable copy, crawler settings, consistent details, is fiddly and technical. It’s exactly the sort of thing we handle for you as part of building and looking after your site, so you show up whether your customer searches Google or asks an AI.
Curious how your business would look, built to be found both ways? Get a free preview, no card needed.