AI search

People increasingly ask ChatGPT and similar services instead of a search engine, and get a ready answer naming two or three companies. Being in that answer is a new channel of clients, and it is still almost empty. Models draw on open sources, so you influence it with the same tools as search, but with different emphases.

Two things are needed: a ready, verifiable fact on your site in a form that is easy to extract, and mentions of you where the model looks. Direct answers in the opening paragraphs, tables, prices as figures and structured markup all help. Padding, promises without numbers, and information hidden inside images all hurt.

This is markup that tells robots what is actually on the page: the organisation, the service, the price, the question and the answer. It does not raise positions on its own, but it earns rich results in search and helps models quote you accurately. The minimum for a business: organisation, services, and a questions block.

llms.txt is a short file where you describe in plain language what the company is and where things live. It is not mandatory and guarantees nothing, but it costs ten minutes and helps models avoid mistakes. More important: do not block AI crawlers in robots.txt if you want to appear in their answers.

Visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity and similar services appear in analytics as distinct sources — you can group them into a segment and count them like search. But most of the effect never reaches your reports: someone reads the answer, remembers the name and arrives later directly. So two manual practices are added to analytics: asking «how did you hear about us» at the point of enquiry, and checking your own questions in the models monthly.