People increasingly ask ChatGPT for advice instead of Google. And the AI recommends specific companies. Here's a plain-language guide to making sure it recommends yours.
What changed
It used to be simple. Someone needs a greenhouse — they google "greenhouse construction," see ten links, and open a few.
Now a growing share of people do something different. They ask ChatGPT: "who builds turnkey greenhouse complexes, and what should I look out for when choosing?" And they don't get a list of links — they get a finished answer: here are three companies, here's how they differ, here's what you should ask them.
The difference matters. On Google you compete for a position in a list. Here you compete to be mentioned in the answer at all.
AI optimization is the work of making sure the AI can find you, understands what you do, knows who to recommend you to, and mentions you in its answers.
Why this traffic is worth more than regular search
Someone arriving from ChatGPT is already close to being a customer.
Picture two visitors. The first found you on Google while wondering "how much does this even cost?" They opened five other tabs and went off to compare.
The second asked the AI a question, got a breakdown of the whole topic, a comparison of the options, and a recommendation. They land on your site at the decision stage — the shortlist is down to two or three companies, and you're on it.
That's why these visitors almost always convert better. They didn't come to learn. They came to talk terms.
The main problem: you can't see it
The most common reaction from business owners: "nobody comes to my site from these AI things."
Check again. A significant share of these visits lose their source data and land in your analytics as "direct traffic" — the same bucket as people who supposedly typed your address by hand.
So you almost certainly already have AI traffic. You're just seeing it under a different name.
What to do: ask your marketer or developer to create a separate source group in Google Analytics for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and Gemini. It takes about fifteen minutes, and the number often surprises people.
What to do with your website: 6 steps
What follows is plain language, no technical detail. Each point can be handed to a developer as a single sentence.
1. Check whether you're letting AI onto your site at all
This is the number one reason a site never gets mentioned.
Every website has a robots.txt file — a set of instructions telling robots what they're allowed to access. Many site owners closed off AI bots there at some point "just in case," or inherited that setting by default. The result: the AI physically cannot read your site, so it never mentions you.
There's a separate trap here. Sometimes robots.txt allows everything, while bot protection at the hosting or Cloudflare level quietly blocks AI crawlers anyway. Checking the file won't reveal that — you have to test actual access.
For your developer: "check whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended are blocked — both in robots.txt and in the bot protection layer."
2. Check whether your text is visible without JavaScript
There's an important distinction here that few people know about.
Google can "run" a page the way a browser does — it sees content that loads via scripts. Most AI crawlers can't. They take only what the server hands over immediately.
What this means in practice: a site built on a modern framework can look perfect in Google and be completely empty to ChatGPT. You won't notice until you check.
For your developer: "check that the main content is delivered in the server-rendered HTML, not only after JavaScript executes."
3. Write answers, not descriptions
This is the most important point, and it isn't technical.
An AI doesn't cite a "nice page" — it cites the specific paragraph that answers a specific question. Which is why an About page reading "we are a dynamic company with an individual approach" will never be quoted. There's simply nothing there to quote.
What works:
- Headings phrased as questions. Not "Our Pricing," but "How much does a turnkey greenhouse cost?"
- The answer immediately under the heading. Not at the end of the section, not after three paragraphs of preamble
- Specifics. Numbers, timelines, conditions. "Two to four weeks" beats "in the shortest possible time"
- Lists and tables. Machines extract information from these far more readily than from solid blocks of text
A simple test: take any page on your site and ask yourself whether there's a paragraph here that could be quoted as a complete answer. If there isn't, it won't be.
4. Put your customers' questions in one place
Take the ten questions you get asked most often on the phone and write short, direct answers to them on your site.
This works on three levels at once:
- the AI gets ready-made question-and-answer pairs that are easy to cite
- the customer resolves their own objections without a salesperson
- you stop spending time on the same phone calls
Separately, ask your developer to add FAQ markup to that section — a technical signal to the machine that these are questions and answers.
5. Tell the machine who you are
There's a specific type of markup — code on the page, invisible to humans, that states plainly: here's the company name, here's what it does, here are the contacts, here are the services, here's the price.
Without it, the machine has to infer all of this from your text. With it, it knows.
The minimum every site should have:
- Organization — who you are, where you are, how to reach you
- Service — what you offer
- FAQPage — your questions and answers block
- LocalBusiness — if you have a physical address
Important: the data in your markup must match what's visible on the page, and match your Google Business Profile. Inconsistencies reduce how much the system trusts you.
For your developer: "add Schema.org markup — Organization, Service, FAQPage — and validate it with Google's Rich Results Test."
6. Keep your information current
AI models pay attention to dates. But something else matters more.
Picture an old page with a promotion from 2023. A human can tell it's outdated — from the design, from the context. A machine sees only text containing prices. And it may recommend terms to a customer that you stopped offering long ago.
Go through your site and remove or update anything containing outdated prices, terms, and offers. This isn't a theoretical problem — it's actual phone calls from people who showed up "for the deal I saw online."
How to check whether it worked
The simplest method: ask ChatGPT about your industry the way a customer would. "Who does X in [your city]?" "Which company should I choose for Y?" See whether you come up, and in what context.
Repeat a month after making changes and you'll see the difference.
Technically: Cloudflare offers a free tool at isitagentready.com — enter your site's address and get a report on what machines can and can't do with it. Bear in mind that it checks the technical side, not the quality of your writing.
What NOT to do
Don't chase llms.txt. This is the file generating a lot of noise right now, along with offers to "set it up for you" at a price. Google itself compared it to the keywords meta tag — something everyone once added that turned out to affect nothing. No harm in having one; paying extra for it isn't worth it.
Don't assume markup solves everything. It amplifies good content and does nothing for empty content. Perfect markup on a page with no information will not get you a single mention.
Don't rewrite your site "for the robots." Everything described above makes the site better for humans too. If a piece of advice makes your site worse for customers, it's bad advice.
In short
AI optimization isn't a separate kind of magic. It's three straightforward things:
- Let the machine onto your site (robots.txt, server-rendered HTML)
- Tell it who you are (markup)
- Give it something to quote (direct answers instead of descriptions)
The best part is that none of it contradicts ordinary common sense. A website that clearly answers a customer's questions performs well everywhere — in Google, in ChatGPT, and with a real human being.
Not sure where to start? We'll check your site for free and tell you exactly what's stopping AI from finding you.