The answer has room for two or three names

When someone asks ChatGPT "which renovation company in London do you recommend?", they do not get ten blue links. They get a paragraph with two or three names. If you are not one of them, you do not exist for that buyer.

AI assistants pick sources they can read easily, understand without ambiguity and find confirmed elsewhere. All three can be built.

1. Let AI crawlers in

Check your robots.txt. Many sites have hastily blocked GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot. Then check whether your page text appears in the HTML your server sends. Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, and a site that builds its content only in the browser looks empty to them.

  • Allow AI search crawlers in robots.txt.
  • Use server rendering or static generation.
  • Publish an /llms.txt file with a summary and key pages.

2. Answer directly, then explain

AI quotes sentences that fully answer a question. Open every important section with the answer in two or three sentences, then go into detail. "How much does a business website cost? From €2,400, fixed, in 3–4 weeks" is quotable. "Pricing depends on many factors" is not.

Put prices, timelines, steps and comparisons in lists and tables. They are the formats extracted most often.

3. Tell it explicitly who you are

Structured data (Schema.org) tells the engine, with no room for interpretation, that you are a business, where you operate, what you offer and which questions you answer. Add Organization or LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList, with the same names, addresses and phone numbers everywhere.

4. Get confirmed off your site

A model trusts what it finds repeated across independent sources: Google Business Profile, niche directories, press coverage, reviews and active social profiles. One good mention in a respected source is worth more than ten articles on your own blog.

5. Measure what assistants say

Pick 20–50 questions your customers ask and put them to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude every month. Record who appears, what is said about you and what is wrong. Without measurement, AEO is just hope.

  • Start with a free Bloc audit: it checks crawler access, schema and llms.txt in 30 seconds.