Key takeaways
- AI assistants favour pages that state facts clearly: who you are, what you do, where and for whom.
- Structured data (schema.org) helps search engines and AI systems connect your business, people and services.
- Question-and-answer content maps directly onto how people prompt AI assistants.
- Traditional SEO foundations like speed, crawlability and helpful content still matter for AI search.
For years, being found online meant ranking on Google. Today, a growing number of people ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot instead, and those assistants answer with a short summary and a handful of cited sources.
If your business isn't one of those sources, you're invisible in that conversation. The good news: the work that makes a site easy for AI to cite is mostly the same work that makes it genuinely useful for people.
State the facts plainly
AI systems extract facts. Make the important ones impossible to miss: your company name, what you do, where you're based, who you serve and how to contact you. Put them in plain sentences, on an About page and in your footer, and keep them consistent everywhere.
Answer real questions
People prompt assistants with questions, so write content that answers them directly. Lead with the answer in one or two sentences, then add detail. FAQ sections are ideal for this.
Use structured data
Schema.org markup tells machines what your content means: that a page describes an Organization, a Service, a Person or an Article. Connecting them in one graph (your company, its founders, its services) helps AI systems understand how everything relates.
Keep the technical foundations strong
- Fast pages that render without heavy client-side JavaScript.
- A clean sitemap and a robots.txt that doesn't block reputable AI crawlers you want to be cited by.
- Descriptive titles, headings and meta descriptions.
- An llms.txt file that summarises your site and links to your key pages.
Earn mentions elsewhere
AI assistants cross-check information. Consistent listings on business directories, your Google Business Profile, press coverage and partner websites all reinforce who you are.