What AI assistants need to recommend you
ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity can only name your business if they can read your website. The five things we check first, and how to fix each one.
More people now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI answers for a recommendation instead of scrolling through search results. Those assistants can only name your business if they can read your website and understand what you do. Here's what we check first.
1. Are the AI crawlers allowed in?
Your robots.txt file tells crawlers what they may read. Some sites block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended, often by accident, through a security plugin or an old template. If a crawler is blocked, that assistant learns nothing from your site.
2. Is there an llms.txt?
It's a new, short text file at the root of your site that says who you are, what you do and which pages matter, written for AI assistants to read. It takes a few minutes to write and removes a lot of guesswork.
3. Do you say who you are in structured data?
Schema.org markup states your business name, address, phone, services and social profiles in a form machines trust. Without it, an assistant has to infer those details from your design, and it often gets them wrong.
4. Are your words in the page itself?
Many crawlers don't run JavaScript. If your text only appears after scripts load, as on many site builders, the crawler sees an almost empty page. Check that your main content is in the HTML your server sends.
5. Are the basics in place?
- A clear title and description on every page, saying what you do and where.
- One main heading per page.
- A sitemap, and HTTPS.
You can check all five on your own site in about 20 seconds with our free AI Visibility Check. It reads your site the way a crawler would and lists what to fix. It's a readiness check: to find out what the assistants actually say about you, we ask them, question by question, as part of our GEO work.