A year ago, someone looking for a provider typed three words into Google and opened five tabs. Today more and more people type something like “I need software to schedule shifts for a 150-person care home, what do you recommend?” into ChatGPT, and go with the answer.
That answer doesn't come from nowhere. When the assistant searches the web, it reads pages, summarizes them and sometimes cites them. If your site is hard to read, or doesn't clearly say what you do, for whom and where, you're left out of the conversation even if you're the best option.
What AI looks at before naming you
Each tool searches its own way. Gemini relies on Google's index; ChatGPT uses Bing's, among other sources; Claude and Perplexity have their own search and crawlers. What they share is that they need to get into your site, understand what it's about and find sentences that answer the exact question they were asked.
So the work looks a lot like classic SEO, with two differences: clarity matters more than keywords, and what other sites say about you carries real weight.
Seven changes you can make this month
- Let the crawlers in. Check your robots.txt: if it blocks GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, those tools can't read you.
- Say what you do in one sentence anyone could quote. “Software that builds rotating shift rosters for 24/7 sites with 50 to 600 people” works. “Innovative solutions for your team” works for nobody.
- Add structured data. It's an invisible block of code that tells Google and AI tools what kind of business you are, where you are, what you sell and who's behind it.
- Build an FAQ section with the real questions you hear in sales calls, answered in two or three direct sentences.
- Show proof that can be checked: named clients, numbers with a period and a source, a team with faces and surnames. AI tends to repeat what it can back up.
- Sign up for Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and submit your sitemap to both.
- Add an llms.txt file with a summary of who you are and your key pages. It's a recent proposal and not every model reads it yet, but it takes half an hour.
What happens outside your website
AI tools cross-check sources. If your site says one thing, your LinkedIn profile another, and Google Maps still shows an old name, the answer comes out muddled or leaves you out. It's worth tidying up your profiles, getting listed in your industry's directories and getting a publication or partner to write about what you do.
How to tell if it's working
Write down 10 to 15 questions your ideal client would ask, and put them to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. Note who shows up, in what order and which sources they cite. Run the same test once a month. It's manual and a bit old-fashioned, but right now it's the most honest way to measure it.
One caveat: nobody can guarantee an AI will recommend you. What you can do is give it everything it needs to, and in most industries the competition hasn't done that yet.
If you'd like us to look at your site, that's exactly what the SEO + AI Sprint is for.