Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews “who builds websites for small hotels in Greece” and you get an answer, not ten blue links. A few businesses get named. Everyone else gets nothing.
You can’t buy your way into that answer. You can make it much easier for the assistant to pick you. That is what this post is about.
What makes you easier to pick
Nobody outside OpenAI, Google or Perplexity knows exactly how their assistants rank businesses, and the rules keep changing. What I do know: when an assistant searches the web for an answer, it can only use what it can reach and read. So in practice, it helps when your pages:
- state facts plainly (what you do, where, for whom, for how much),
- match what other sources say about you,
- are actually reachable by the assistant’s crawler.
Clever slogans don’t help here. “We craft digital experiences” gives a machine nothing to quote. “We build WordPress sites for hotels in the Cyclades” gives it a clear answer.
Six fixes you can make this week
1. Write one plain answer per service page. Near the top, two or three sentences: what the service is, who it is for, where you offer it, and what it costs or how pricing works. This gives an assistant (and a skimming human) one clean block to quote.
2. Put your facts in text, not images. Prices in a JPEG, opening hours in a banner, service areas in a map embed: a person sees them, a crawler often doesn’t. If it matters, it should be selectable text.
3. Make your business details match everywhere. Same name, address, phone and hours on your site, your Google Business Profile and the directories you are listed on. Conflicting details make you harder to trust, for people and machines.
4. Check your robots.txt. Some sites block AI crawlers by accident, through a plugin or an old copy-paste. If you block OAI-SearchBot, you are asking not to appear in ChatGPT’s search answers. Decide on purpose, not by accident. (Blocking training crawlers like GPTBot is a separate choice.)
5. Add structured data. Organization or LocalBusiness markup tells machines your name, location, contact details and opening hours in a format they don’t have to guess. Most site builders and SEO plugins can add it.
6. Earn mentions on sites that are not yours. Reviews on Google, a listing in a respected industry directory, a quote in a local article. Independent mentions give an assistant more places to find and confirm the facts about you. They also persuade humans, which was the point all along.
How to check where you stand
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google. Ask each the question your best customer would ask, in their words, not yours. Note who gets named and which pages get cited. Then compare those pages with yours, using the six points above.
It takes twenty minutes and it is usually humbling. That’s fine. Humbling is where the to-do list comes from.
If you would rather have someone else do it, that is exactly what my free website check covers: how Google and AI assistants read your site today, and what to fix first, in plain words.