Search Google for how often a boiler needs servicing and you will often see a summary first, with a few sources beneath it. Others ask the same question in ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or another AI assistant. For a small business, the question shifts from “am I at the top?” to “am I mentioned when someone wants to know or buy something?”.
The foundation of visibility stays the same; it is covered in our article on SEO for small businesses. This article is about what comes on top.
What is changing and what we do not know
A few things are clear. For informational questions, the answer increasingly appears in the search results themselves, so fewer people click through. For questions where someone wants to buy or book, a website is still needed: that is where the offer, price, availability and booking button live.
What nobody outside the providers knows exactly is how an AI system chooses its sources. Anyone promising a trick to get into AI answers claims to know more than the providers publish. Google states in its documentation that AI Overviews rely on the same basics as ordinary results: the page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet. No special markup or setting is required.
Write answers that stand on their own
An AI Overview or assistant often lifts a passage from a page. That works best when the passage makes sense without the rest.
- Answer directly below the question: put the core in the first one or two sentences of a section, then the explanation.
- One question per section: a heading such as “How long does a colour treatment take?” with the answer beneath is clearer than a long text about “our treatments”.
- State facts only you have: your service area, opening hours, lead times, brands you work with, how an appointment goes. An assistant can give general explanations without you.
- Keep it current: a listing with old opening hours or an expired offer may be repeated word for word.
Structure and structured data
Structure on the page
Headings in a logical order, lists for steps and enumerations, tables for comparisons. That makes it visible which text belongs to which question. A yoga studio that puts class types, levels and prices in a table makes life easier for readers and systems than with three paragraphs of running text.
Structured data
Schema.org markup describes in a fixed format what is on the page. For small businesses these are the most useful types:
- Organization or LocalBusiness: name, address, phone number, opening hours and logo.
- Service or Product: what you offer, optionally with pricing information.
- FAQPage: frequently asked questions that are also visible on the page. Since 2023 Google only shows expandable questions in its results for a small group of sites, but the markup still describes the content.
The rule that always applies: markup must match what the visitor sees. Data that exists only in the code can work against you.
Brand and reviews carry more weight
When someone asks an assistant for a good garage in Haarlem or a hotel near the Vondelpark, the answer is about businesses, not individual pages. What helps in any case is that your business is recognisable and described the same way everywhere:
- The same name and details: on your website, business profile, industry sites and social media.
- Reviews in several places: recent, with substance, and with a reply from you.
- Mentions by others: a trade association, supplier or local paper that names you.
Asking for reviews by hand takes time. The review collection add-on sends a request automatically after an appointment or job.
AI crawlers in your robots.txt
AI providers read the web with their own crawlers. In your robots.txt you decide per crawler whether it may read your site. The best known:
- GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot: from OpenAI. The first collects text to train models, the second to show your site in search results within ChatGPT.
- ClaudeBot: from Anthropic.
- PerplexityBot: from Perplexity, for search results in that service.
- Google-Extended: controls whether Google may use your content for its Gemini models. According to Google it has no effect on your place in Google Search, including AI Overviews; those run through the ordinary Googlebot.
- Applebot-Extended: controls whether Apple may use your content for its AI models.
If you want to be mentioned, do not block the crawlers that feed search results without a reason. Some website packages and security services block AI crawlers by default, so check. Bear in mind too that robots.txt is a request, not a lock: well-behaved crawlers follow it, others do not.
What you can measure
- Search Console: impressions and clicks from AI Overviews are counted in the Performance report under ordinary web results. If clicks fall while impressions stay level, your answer is being given directly more often.
- Referrals in your analytics: visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and similar services appear as referral traffic.
- Ask for yourself: put your customers’ questions to a few assistants and see whether and how your business is mentioned. Do this now and then, as the answers vary.
- Ask new customers how they found you: the simplest and often most honest answer.
The websites we build alongside our software come with structured data, a clear heading structure and a robots.txt with explicit rules for AI crawlers as standard.
Frequently asked questions
Should I put an llms.txt file on my site?
It does no harm, but Google does not use it and it is not an established standard. A clear site with good structure and a correct robots.txt matters more.
Will an AI Overview cost me visitors?
For informational questions it can, because the answer is already in the results. For questions where someone wants to book or buy, your website remains the place where that happens.
Should I block AI crawlers?
That is your own trade-off. If you block the crawlers that feed search results, you are less likely to be mentioned there. With some providers you can handle training and search results separately.