How to make your business AI-ready

For the bigger picture of how AI answers pick businesses, read Does your business show up in AI answers? This page is the hands-on part.

1. A complete Google Business Profile

For a local business, this listing feeds Google's own AI answers and is widely copied elsewhere. Claim and verify it, then fill in every field: categories, services, hours, holiday hours, service area, photos and a plain description of what you do. If you serve customers at their location, set it up as a service-area business and hide your street address.

Then do the same, more briefly, on Bing Places (which feeds Copilot) and Apple Business Connect.

2. The same name, address and phone everywhere

Your business name, address (or service area) and phone number should match on your website, your profiles, Yelp, Facebook and any directory you are listed in. Search for your old phone number or old address. Every listing that still shows it is telling AI tools something out of date. Update or remove those.

3. A clear title and description on every page

Each page has a title (the text in the browser tab and the blue link in search) and a meta description (the summary under it). AI tools read these to understand what a page is about. Make them specific: "Dog grooming in Tempe | Your Business Name" says far more than "Home".

Most website builders and WordPress SEO plugins have a "page title" and "description" field in each page's settings. Fill them in for your home page and each service page.

4. Structured data (Organization or LocalBusiness)

Structured data is a small block of code that labels your business details in a format machines read directly. It does not guarantee anything. It removes guesswork about who you are, where you are and what you do. Here is a minimal example for a local business:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "Your Business Name",
  "url": "https://www.yourdomain.com/",
  "telephone": "+1-602-555-0100",
  "areaServed": "Phoenix, AZ",
  "description": "One plain sentence about what you do.",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.facebook.com/yourbusiness",
    "https://www.yelp.com/biz/yourbusiness"
  ]
}
</script>

Swap in your real details and paste it into the head of your home page. Use a more specific type if one fits (for example Dentist, Plumber or LegalService), or Organization if you do not serve a local area. If you have a storefront, add your street address. Many platforms add some of this for you, and WordPress SEO plugins have a settings page for it. Then test the page with Google's Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator to catch typos.

5. Do not block AI crawlers by accident

Your robots.txt file (at yourdomain.com/robots.txt) tells crawlers what they may read. Some sites block AI crawlers on purpose. Many do it by accident, through a template, a plugin or a security setting. Open yours and look for any of these names on a User-agent line followed by Disallow: /:

• GPTBot
• OAI-SearchBot
• ClaudeBot
• PerplexityBot
• Google-Extended

A short explanation of each: GPTBot and ClaudeBot collect pages that may be used to train OpenAI's and Anthropic's models. OAI-SearchBot is what ChatGPT's search uses to find pages. PerplexityBot indexes pages for Perplexity's answers. Google-Extended is not a separate crawler; it is a setting that controls whether Google may use your pages for its Gemini models. Blocking it does not remove you from regular Google Search.

If you want AI assistants to be able to read your site, a simple robots.txt is enough:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Choosing to block training crawlers is a fair business decision. Just make it on purpose. Also check your Cloudflare dashboard if you use it: Cloudflare offers a setting that blocks AI crawlers, and since 2025 it may be switched on by default for newly added sites.

6. Reviews and mentions on other sites

Assistants trust what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself. Ask happy customers for reviews on Google and the sites that matter in your industry, reply to them, and look for honest mentions: your chamber of commerce, an industry association, a supplier's customer page, local news. Never buy or write reviews.

What about llms.txt?

llms.txt is a proposed file that summarizes your site for AI tools. It is optional and harmless, and we keep one on our own site. It is not a ranking lever. As of this writing I am not aware of any major AI provider saying it uses llms.txt to decide which businesses to mention. Do the six items above first.