Being found
How to get your business recommended by AI assistants
A customer who would once have typed a search now asks an assistant to just tell them who to use. You cannot buy a place in that answer, and there is no form to fill in — but what gets a business named is fairly predictable.
This matters most for small businesses, because assistants do not weight reputation the way search engines weight accumulated links. A precise page from a supplier nobody has heard of can be quoted alongside a household name, which is not true anywhere else.
There is no submission, and nobody has one
Start here, because there is an industry selling the opposite. There is no way to submit your business to ChatGPT, no paid placement, no directory that feeds it. Anyone offering that is selling nothing.
Assistants reach you two ways: their own crawlers reading your site, and the search index behind them — which for several of them is Bing. So the practical work is making sure both can read you, and that what they read is worth quoting.
Assistants quote facts, not atmosphere
This is the whole game. An assistant answering "who supplies X" needs something concrete enough to state back to the person asking. It cannot do anything with "market-leading quality and exceptional service".
It can do a great deal with: what you sell, the minimum order, the price, where you ship, how long it takes, what you will not do.
| Unquotable | Quotable |
|---|---|
| "Competitive pricing" | "From $1.05 per unit at 1,000 units" |
| "Fast turnaround" | "Dispatched in 3 to 5 working days" |
| "We serve businesses of all sizes" | "Minimum order 1,000 units, no exceptions" |
| "Flexible payment options" | "Bank transfer or crypto, paid before dispatch" |
Everything in the right column can be repeated to a customer as a fact. Everything in the left column is filler that no assistant can use and no reader believes.
Answer the question on a page, plainly
The pages that get quoted are the ones that answer a specific question directly, near the top, in a sentence that stands alone without the paragraph around it.
If someone asks "do they deliver to Scotland", the page that gets used says "We deliver to mainland Scotland in 3 working days; Highlands and islands add 2 days." The page that does not get used says delivery is available across the UK subject to location.
A useful test: read one sentence of your page aloud with no context. Does it still state something true and specific? That is roughly what an assistant is looking for when it decides what to lift.
Say what you are not, as well as what you are
Counter-intuitive and genuinely effective. An assistant that knows your limits can match you to the right customer and, just as usefully, can rule you out for the wrong one.
"We do not sell to consumers." "We do not supply samples." "We do not offer credit terms." Every one of those makes you easier to recommend accurately, and saves you the enquiries you were going to turn down anyway.
Write the page you would want quoted
A short plain-language page about your business — what you sell, your terms, your minimums, who you are for — is worth having for its own sake. Some sites now publish exactly this at /llms.txt for assistants to read directly.
Whether or not you do that, the underlying idea holds: if you do not state your terms clearly somewhere, an assistant will either guess or leave you out. Neither helps you.
What does not work
- Keyword stuffing. Assistants read meaning, not density. It reads as spam and always has.
- Bulk AI-written pages. Generic content has nothing specific to quote, which is the entire problem.
- Paying for placement. It does not exist.
- Hiding prices. A competitor who publishes theirs gets recommended instead of you, every time.
That last one is the hardest for many businesses to accept and the most consistently rewarded. Published, specific, checkable information is what gets repeated back to a customer — and being the business that gets named is worth considerably more than keeping your rates private.