Built to be found by AI
More people now ask an assistant for a recommendation than open a search engine and scroll. Most websites are not built to be read that way.
Assistants read differently
A search engine indexes a page and ranks it against others. An assistant reads a page and tries to answer a question from it — and if it can't find a clear answer, it uses somebody else's page instead.
That rewards different things. Facts stated plainly rather than implied by a photograph. Questions answered where they are asked. Structured data that agrees with what the page visibly says.
What that involves
Clean, semantic markup so the shape of the page is machine-readable. Real business facts — service area, contact details, what you actually do — marked up as data rather than baked into an image. An llms.txt so a crawler is told where the useful pages are.
And a crawler policy that is deliberate: naming the assistants you want reading you, rather than leaving it silent and hoping. Some treat an unmentioned crawler as disallowed, so silence is not a neutral position.
What's included
- Semantic markup an assistant can parse without guessing
- Structured data that matches what the page says
- An llms.txt pointing crawlers at the pages worth reading
- A robots policy that names the AI crawlers explicitly
- Business facts written as facts, not implied by design
Nobody can promise an assistant will recommend you, and anyone who does is selling something. What can be done is making sure you are legible and quotable when one goes looking — the rest is up to what you offer.