How to get your small business found in AI search

What’s changed, and what hasn’t

A growing number of buyers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot questions like “who can help me audit our onboarding flow?” before they ever open a search engine. Google also shows AI-generated overviews above many results. If you run a small business, it’s fair to wonder how to show up in those answers.

The honest answer: there’s no shortcut, so be cautious of anyone who promises one. Google says its AI features rely on the same fundamentals as normal search. AI assistants that browse the web mostly draw on search indexes and their own crawlers. So the basics matter more than ever. But a few habits make a real difference to whether an AI can understand and describe your business accurately.

1. Make sure your site can be read

This sounds obvious, but it’s where most problems start.

• Check your robots.txt isn’t blocking search crawlers. Leftover “disallow everything” rules from a preview site are surprisingly common.
• Remove “noindex” tags from pages you want found.
• Make sure your important content is in the HTML, not only loaded by JavaScript or hidden in images and PDFs.
• Submit a sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Several AI assistants lean on Bing’s index, so don’t skip it.

Some AI companies use separate crawlers for search and for training. OpenAI, for example, documents its search crawler separately from the one used for training models. You can allow one and block the other in robots.txt if you want to appear in answers without contributing to training.

2. Say clearly who you are

AI systems build a picture of your business as an entity: a name, what it does, where it’s based, who runs it. Help them by stating these facts plainly on your site.

• An About page that names the people behind the business and their experience.
• Your services described in plain language, with who they’re for.
• Your location, or the areas you serve, and how to contact you.
• Your legal company name and number, if you’re a limited company.

Then add structured data, especially Organization and Person markup, linking your site to your profiles. It’s a small amount of code that removes a lot of ambiguity.

3. Be consistent everywhere

If your website says “UX consultancy for B2B teams”, LinkedIn says “freelance designer” and your directory listing says “digital agency”, an AI has to guess which is true. Use the same name, description, location and contact details across your website, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, marketplace profiles and directories. Consistency is how an AI gains confidence that all these sources describe the same business.

4. Answer the questions people ask

AI answers often quote or paraphrase pages that answer a specific question directly. Structure your content the same way:

• Use questions as headings where it’s natural: “How much does a UX audit cost?”
• Answer in the first two or three sentences, then go into detail.
• Include specifics: what’s included, how long it takes, who it’s for, what it’s not for.
• Put a real author’s name on articles, with a short bio.

Every guide on this site follows that pattern, for exactly this reason.

5. Earn mentions elsewhere

AI systems don’t just read your website. They read what others say about you: reviews, directory listings, articles that mention you, conference talks, podcast notes, and profiles on platforms like LinkedIn. A handful of genuine, consistent third-party mentions does more than another ten pages on your own site.

6. Check what the assistants already think

Every few months, ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot the questions your customers would ask, including your business name. Note what’s wrong or missing, then fix it at the source: usually your own site or a profile that’s out of date.

What about llms.txt?

llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file that gives AI tools a short summary of your site and links to your key pages. It’s cheap to add and harmless, but support is patchy and the major search engines don’t rely on it. Treat it as a nice extra, not a strategy.

Digital Foundations includes search metadata, structured data and consistent launch profiles as standard. Get in touch if you’d like your new business set up properly from day one.