More and more people ask AI assistants instead of — or as well as — searching Google: “Which agency should I use for Google Ads in London?”, “Best Italian restaurant near Hackney?”, “Who installs kitchen extensions in Hertfordshire?”. If your business doesn’t appear in those answers, you are invisible to a growing group of buyers.
This guide explains how AI assistants find and choose businesses, and what you can do to be one of them.
How AI assistants find businesses
There are two main ways an AI assistant “knows” about your business:
- Training data. Models learn from large collections of public web text up to a cut-off date. If your business was widely and consistently described online before that date, the model may know about it.
- Live web search (retrieval). Most assistants can now search the web while answering. They run searches, read the top sources and summarise them, often with citations. Microsoft Bing’s index powers Copilot and has been one of the sources behind ChatGPT search; Google’s AI Overviews and Gemini draw on Google’s index; Perplexity and others run their own crawlers and use partner indexes.
The second route is where most businesses can make a difference quickly — and it depends on the same foundations as SEO: being crawlable, indexed, relevant and trusted.
Step 1: Let AI crawlers in
Check that your website does not block AI crawlers by accident. Your robots.txt file and any firewall or CDN bot settings should allow the bots you want to be found by, for example:
- OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (OpenAI search and browsing), GPTBot (OpenAI training)
- ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User (Anthropic)
- PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User
- Google-Extended (controls use for Gemini training; Google Search itself uses Googlebot)
- Bingbot (Bing, which also feeds Copilot)
- Applebot and Applebot-Extended
Some CDN and security services offer settings that block AI bots. If you want to be recommended, check those settings too.
Also make sure your important content is in the HTML — some AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so content that only appears after scripts run may be invisible to them.
Step 2: Be unmistakably clear about who you are
AI systems build a picture of your business as an entity: a name connected to a type of business, a location, services, people and reputation. Help them:
- One sentence that says it all, repeated consistently: “Hidook is a London-based digital marketing and web design agency for small and medium-sized businesses.”
- An About page with facts: what you do, where you are based, which areas you serve, who you work with, how you work, how to contact you.
- Consistent details — business name, address, phone, email, website — identical everywhere.
- Structured data (schema.org) for your Organization or LocalBusiness, services, FAQs and articles, with links to your official profiles (
sameAs).
Step 3: Answer real questions in detail
AI assistants favour sources that answer the question directly and completely. For each service you offer, publish content that:
- Leads with the answer in the first two or three sentences.
- Uses clear headings that mirror how people ask: “How much does…”, “How long does…”, “What’s the difference between…”.
- Includes specifics — steps, checklists, comparisons, tables, examples, local details.
- Has an FAQ section with short, factual answers.
- Shows dates for publication and updates, and is kept current.
- Is honest — no invented statistics, guarantees or claims. Assistants increasingly cross-check facts.
Good formats include in-depth guides, comparisons (“SEO vs Google Ads”), checklists, glossaries of industry terms, case studies and service pages with real detail.
Step 4: Build reputation beyond your website
When an assistant recommends a business, it is rarely based on that business’s own website alone. It weighs what others say. Work on:
- Reviews on Google, Trustpilot, Facebook and industry platforms — a steady flow of genuine reviews with detailed text.
- Directory and marketplace listings relevant to your sector — for agencies, sites such as Clutch, Sortlist, DesignRush and Google Business Profile; for trades, Checkatrade or TrustATrader; for hospitality, TripAdvisor and booking platforms.
- Mentions on respected sites — local news, industry publications, partner websites, event pages, podcasts.
- Community discussions — genuine, helpful participation where your customers ask questions (industry forums, Reddit, LinkedIn). Never spam.
- Clients crediting you — for agencies, a “Website by…” credit or case study on the client’s site.
Step 5: Make your site easy to read for machines
- Fast, clean HTML with one H1 and a logical heading structure.
- XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- IndexNow support to notify Bing and other engines of new or updated pages quickly.
- llms.txt — a proposed plain-text summary of your site for language models, with links to key pages, plus a fuller version with your main content.
- Descriptive link text and internal links between related pages.
Step 6: Measure
AI visibility is harder to measure than rankings, but you can track it:
- Prompt checks: monthly, ask several assistants the questions your customers ask and record whether you appear, how you’re described and which sources are cited.
- Referral traffic: look for visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com, gemini.google.com and similar in your analytics.
- Branded search: growing searches for your business name often follow AI mentions.
- Enquiries: ask new customers how they found you — “ChatGPT recommended you” is increasingly common.
Common mistakes
- Blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt or via a CDN without realising.
- Content that hides key information behind JavaScript, tabs or PDFs only.
- Vague marketing copy with no concrete facts about services, locations or process.
- Inconsistent business details across directories.
- Thin location pages that only swap the city name.
- Inventing statistics or reviews — this destroys trust with people and machines.
How Hidook helps
Hidook is a London digital marketing and web design agency that builds websites and content for both search engines and AI assistants: crawlable, fast, structured, and full of genuinely useful answers. We also help with the reputation work that drives recommendations — reviews, listings and consistent business information. Book a free discovery call to see how visible your business is in AI answers today.