Get found by Google. Get quoted by AI.

Not to be found in Google or in AI answers. Google says no special AI files are needed, and the file mainly helps sites whose readers are coding assistants, such as developer documentation.

Block the training bots if you want to, but leave the search and user bots alone. Those are the ones that let ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity find your pages and recommend you.

Search engines and AI engines connect everything written about you by name. Variants can split those mentions across what look like several businesses, so pick one exact name and use it on your site, your Google profile, your socials and every directory.

Put what the page offers first, then who or where it is for, then your brand. Give each page one H1 that says what the page does in the words a buyer would type.

Use the questions customers actually ask you, in their words, and answer each one in two or three plain sentences that make sense on their own. Markup is optional; the answers are what get quoted.

No. We asked ChatGPT to recommend a small business accountant in Bristol five times and got ten different firms, with only one named in every answer. A single answer is one sample, so count across several before you decide anything.

Because it has not read about you anywhere except your own website. AI assistants build a recommendation from third-party list pages and the plain sentences on each business's own site, so a business nobody else describes is easy to leave out.

Be on the pages the AI engines read, say plainly what you do and where, and check by asking ChatGPT the way a buyer would, several times. The crawlable pages that rank in Google are the same pages ChatGPT reads before it recommends anyone, so the work overlaps far more than the two acronyms suggest.

CTI Digital and MadeByShape were named in all five ChatGPT answers, in a run that turned up ten Manchester agencies in total. None of the five ranked its picks, and every name arrived attached to a job type instead.

Yes, if you want AI answers to do the selling for you. When we asked ChatGPT to recommend a wedding photographer in Leeds, every price it quoted sat on a page it could read, and the businesses that hide their prices got the buyer sent away to ask.

It is a free Google account that reports on your own site: which searches your pages appeared in, what got clicked, and which pages Google never indexed. Use it because it records the exact words real buyers typed to find you, and those are the words you now have to answer.