How to get your business recommended by AI search in 2026

A growing share of your customers never see a page of ten blue links. They ask an AI assistant something like “best accountant for small businesses in London” and get a short answer with two or three names in it. If you’re not one of those names, you don’t get the chance to compete.

The good news is that the things that get a business recommended by AI tools are mostly the same things that make it easy to trust online. Here are the seven steps we work through with clients.

1. Let AI crawlers read your site

AI assistants learn about businesses through web crawlers, just like search engines do. Check that your robots.txt file isn’t blocking them by accident. Common AI crawlers include GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic) and PerplexityBot. Google’s AI Overviews rely on the same Googlebot crawling as normal search.

Make sure your important content is in the page itself. Text that only appears after heavy scripts run, or that sits inside images, is harder for any crawler to read.

2. Say exactly what you do, for whom and where

AI tools summarise, so make that easy. Your homepage and service pages should say in plain words what you offer, who it’s for and where you work. Use the same business name, address and phone number everywhere: your website, Google Business Profile, social profiles and directories. Inconsistent details make it harder for any system to be confident that you’re the right answer.

3. Add structured data

Structured data is a small block of code (schema.org markup, usually written as JSON-LD) that labels the facts on your page so machines don’t have to guess. For most businesses, start with:

• Organization or LocalBusiness: your name, logo, contact details and the area you serve.
• Service: one entry for each service you offer.
• FAQPage: real questions and answers from your customers.
• Article or BlogPosting: for blog posts, with the author and date.

You can check your markup with Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator.

4. Publish answers, not slogans

AI assistants quote pages that answer questions clearly. Write pages that cover what customers ask before they buy. How much does it cost? How long does it take? How do you compare with the alternatives? What happens after I sign up?

Use specific numbers, examples and dates. A line like “we deliver excellence” gives an AI nothing to repeat. “Most brand projects take six to eight weeks” does.

5. Earn mentions on other sites

When AI tools recommend a business, they lean heavily on what other sources say: reviews, news articles, industry lists, podcasts and community discussions. Ask happy customers for reviews, pitch useful stories to local media and industry sites, and get listed in the directories your customers already use.

6. Add an llms.txt file

llms.txt is a proposed standard: a short plain-text summary of your site, placed at yourdomain.com/llms.txt, that points AI tools to your most important pages. Support varies between AI companies and it won’t replace the steps above, but it takes about ten minutes to write. This website has one.

7. Measure it

Once a month, ask the main assistants the questions your customers ask and note whether you’re mentioned and what they say about you. In your analytics, watch referral traffic from sources like chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com. It’s still a young channel, so the trend matters more than any single number.

None of this replaces a good product and happy customers. If you already have both, these steps make sure AI search knows about it.