"You need to be in AI" - you hear it more and more, and usually no one says what that actually means. For a business it comes down to two questions. First: can an assistant read your website at all. Second: does it name you when a customer asks who to hire.
Those are not the same thing. You can have a site a bot can read and still never appear in an answer. You can also be named because someone wrote about you somewhere else, while your own site is blank to a machine. That second case is fragile - it disappears when the other source does.
Two things that are easy to mix up
Whether AI reads the site. A bot visits the address, fetches the content and learns what you do, where you work and how to contact you.
Whether AI recommends you. Someone asks: "who builds websites for companies in Szczecin?" or "recommend a good plumber nearby." The answer names specific businesses. Yours, or someone else's.
Reading is the condition. Being recommended is the result. Most businesses that "aren't in ChatGPT" fail at the first gate - and do not even know it.
On why customers started asking assistants instead of typing a query into Google, we wrote separately. This is just the test.
A ten-minute test
Ask the question the way a customer would. Not "my company name." Something concrete: the service and the city, or the problem you solve.
- ChatGPT - "recommend a company that [service] in [city]." Write down who it names.
- Perplexity - the same question. Sources are visible, so you can see where the answer came from and whether your site is among them.
- Google - the same query. Check whether there is an AI answer above the results, and whether you are in it or in the links under it.
Then a second question, this time about you: "What do you know about [company name]?" If the assistant invents an address, mixes up your trade or says it knows nothing, your site is not its source. Facts come from what can be read, not from wishing.
Write the result down. Repeat the same questions in a month. Without that you will not see whether anything moved.
Whether a bot can get in at all
Before you rewrite the copy, check that the door is open. Three things, a minute each.
robots.txt. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Look for Disallow next to assistant bots: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot (Claude), PerplexityBot (Perplexity). If they are blocked, those tools may not read your site. Googlebot is a separate matter - do not block it. Without it you are not in Google, and the AI answer above the results draws from the same pool of pages.
Content in the page source, not only on screen. Open the site and choose "view page source" - not the inspector, the source. If that file does not contain your offer, and you only see it after the page loads, some AI bots will not get that content. Google handles this better. Assistants often do not.
llms.txt. At /llms.txt some sites keep a list of important pages, written for agents. It is not a switch that says "show up in ChatGPT." It is a signpost: which addresses are worth reading. If you do not have one, do not panic. If it points nowhere, you gain nothing either.
Why it does not name you, even when it can read the site
An assistant gives a few names, not fifty. The one that wins can be summarised in a single sentence and can be trusted.
- The site says plainly what you do, for whom, where, and what the next step is. "Innovative solutions tailored to your needs" cannot be quoted, because it means nothing.
- The same name, address and phone number on the site, on the Google Business Profile and in directories. Mismatched details tell the model these might be two different businesses.
- Someone besides you writes about you: reviews, articles, mentions. Your own site is one source. A model is more willing to repeat something it has heard in several places.
Being read and being recommended are not the same thing. Open the door first, then write so you can be quoted in one sentence.
What not to do
- Do not paste hidden text "for AI" into the page. That is an old spam trick and it works against you.
- Do not count on a guaranteed spot in ChatGPT. You cannot buy that the way you buy ads. You can improve the odds - you cannot order them.
- Do not abandon Google. Most queries still happen there, and AI answers often stand on the same pages.
Where to start
Run the three-question test. If you are missing from the answers, and robots.txt blocks the bots or the page source has no offer in it - that is the first thing to fix. Touch the copy only once a machine can actually read it.
If you want us to check both things at once - whether AI can read the site and whether you get recommended - start with a free audit or get in touch.