Your Next Customer May Ask Claude or ChatGPT Instead of Google. Can They See You?

A quiet change is happening in how people find local businesses. Instead of typing "IT support Farnborough" into Google and scanning ten blue links, a growing number of people ask ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity a full question: "Who is a good IT support company near Farnborough for a 20-person office?" The assistant answers with two or three names.

If your business is one of those names, that is the warmest lead you will ever get. If it is not, you were never in the running and you will never know.

How AI assistants decide who to mention

There is no submission form and no ad auction for these answers. The assistants rely on two things: what their underlying models learned about the web, and what their live search tools can read right now. Both routes lead back to the same place, which is your website.

Here is the part most business owners have not heard. The crawlers that fetch pages for AI assistants do not behave like Google. Google runs a full browser and will eventually see content that JavaScript builds on the fly. The AI crawlers mostly do not. They fetch the raw page, read whatever text is actually in it, and move on. A site built as a JavaScript app can look perfect in your browser and be practically empty to them.

We rebuilt our own site this month partly for this exact reason, so this is not theory to us. Before the rebuild, a crawler fetching some of our pages got a title, one sentence, and a pile of menu links. After it, every page serves its full content in plain HTML, before any script runs.

What to check on your own site

You can test this in one minute. Open your homepage, view the page source (not inspect, view source), and search for a sentence you know is on the page. If your actual sales copy is not there in the raw source, AI assistants are not reading it.

Beyond that, the checklist for being quotable is refreshingly honest work:

Answer questions directly. Assistants extract and repeat clear statements. "A starter website costs from 1,500 pounds and is typically live in 3 to 4 weeks" is quotable. "Bespoke solutions tailored to your needs" is not.

Publish real prices. When someone asks an assistant what a service costs, it cites pages that state numbers. Businesses that hide pricing are invisible in exactly the conversations where buyers are comparing.

Keep your details consistent. Your name, address and phone number should match everywhere: your site, Google Business Profile, Companies House, directories. Assistants cross-check, and inconsistency reads as unreliability.

Use structured data. Schema markup tells machines plainly who you are, where you operate and what you sell. It is invisible to visitors and load-bearing for machines.

Do not block the crawlers. Some sites block AI bots in robots.txt on principle. That is a legitimate choice, but understand what it buys you: invisibility in the fastest-growing referral channel there is.

Consider an llms.txt file. It is an emerging convention: a plain-text summary of your business, services and prices at a fixed address, written for machines. It costs an hour and removes any ambiguity about what you do.

The good news

Almost none of your local competitors have done any of this. Classic SEO in a local market is a slow fight over established rankings. AI answers are not established yet. A small firm with a genuinely readable, specific, honest website can end up being the name an assistant gives, ahead of bigger competitors with prettier but emptier sites.

The work is the same work good SEO has always rewarded: fast pages, clear answers, real information, consistent facts. The audience reading it has changed.

We include an AI-readability check in our free SEO audit. It will tell you in writing what the crawlers currently see on your site, which is sometimes an uncomfortable page one.