Not long ago, someone looking for a plumber in Kalamunda or a café in the Perth Hills would type a few words into Google and scroll through the results. More and more, they're asking an AI assistant instead: "Who's a good bookkeeper near Midland?" or "What's a family-friendly winery in the Bickley Valley?"
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI answers give one neat reply, often naming just two or three businesses. If yours isn't one of them, that customer may never see your website at all.
The good news is that you don't need a big budget to give your business a fair chance. You just need to make it easy for these tools to find you, read your website and get your details right.
How AI search finds businesses
AI assistants don't know about your business by magic. When they answer a question about local businesses, they draw on two things:
- What they've already read. AI models are trained on huge amounts of text from the web. If your website was hard to read or blocked when they collected it, they know little or nothing about you.
- What they look up right now. Many assistants now search the web live before they answer. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews all do this, and they lean heavily on websites, Google Business Profiles, directories and reviews.
In both cases, the AI can only describe your business using what it can find and understand. If your website is unclear, or your details are different from one site to the next, it may leave you out or get you wrong.
Why some small businesses get left out
When we checked our own website, we found three different versions of our phone number across the web, behind-the-scenes code that gave out the wrong details, and case studies that search engines couldn't see at all. None of it was obvious from looking at the site. It's very common, and these are the usual culprits:
- AI crawlers are blocked by accident. A security plugin, a firewall setting or a line in your robots.txt file can quietly stop AI tools from visiting your site.
- Content that only appears after JavaScript runs. Some website builders load text in a way people see but crawlers don't.
- Vague wording. "We offer quality solutions" tells an AI nothing. "We repair air conditioners in Kalamunda, Lesmurdie and Forrestfield" tells it exactly who you are.
- Details that don't match. An old address on a directory, a different phone number on Facebook, or opening hours that disagree with your Google profile all create doubt.
Six things to check on your website
1. Make sure AI tools are allowed in
Look at your robots.txt file by adding /robots.txt to the end of your website address. If you see lines blocking GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, those tools may not be able to read your site. Unless you have a reason to block them, let them in.
2. Say clearly what you do and where
Your homepage should state, in plain words, what your business does, who it's for and which areas you serve. Give each main service its own page. If you serve several suburbs or towns, mention them by name.
3. Put your key facts in one place
Make your business name, address, phone number, email and opening hours easy to find, ideally in the footer of every page, and keep them identical everywhere: your website, your Google Business Profile, Facebook and directories such as Yellow Pages.
4. Add structured data
Structured data is a small block of behind-the-scenes code that tells search engines and AI tools your business details in a format they understand exactly: your business type, address, phone, hours and services. Your web developer can add it, and it's one of the most useful things you can do.
5. Answer the questions your customers ask
AI assistants love clear answers. A short FAQ section on each service page ("How much does it cost?", "How long does it take?", "Do you service my area?") gives them something reliable to quote.
6. Build up genuine reviews
Reviews on Google and other sites are one of the strongest signals for local businesses, for AI tools as much as for people. Make asking for a review part of how you finish every job.
A note on llms.txt
You may have heard of llms.txt, a plain-text file that summarises your business for AI tools. It's a newer idea and not every AI tool uses it yet, but it's quick to add and costs nothing, so we include it in our setups. It's a nice extra, not a replacement for the checks above.
What you can't control
No one can make ChatGPT recommend your business, and anyone who promises that is overselling. AI answers change from day to day and depend on what each person asks. What you can control is whether these tools can find you, read your website and get your details right. That's the foundation everything else is built on.
See how your website measures up
Our free website health check looks at your homepage the way Google and AI tools do. It checks whether AI crawlers are blocked, whether you have structured data, and whether your key details are clear. It takes about 30 seconds and gives you a list of the top things to fix.
If you'd like us to fix them for you, our SEO and AI visibility service covers everything in this article, with a before-and-after report so you can see the difference.