How to Get Your Business Found by AI: The 7 Point Check
Short answer: seven things. Let the AI crawlers in, make your business details identical everywhere, add three types of schema markup, confirm your pages are indexed, claim all three map platforms, match your profiles and link them with sameAs, and write an FAQ that answers the questions buyers actually have.
That is the whole list. It is finite, it is mostly plumbing, and almost no small business has done it. Which is exactly why doing it works.
This page is the summary. Each check links to a full walkthrough.
Why this matters now
Your customers have started asking a machine instead of Google.
Not everyone. Not yet. But the ones who do are further down the path than a searcher ever was. They are not browsing ten blue links and making up their own mind. They ask a direct question and take a short answer, and that answer often names one or two specific businesses.
You are either named in that answer or you are not. There is no page two.
The good news is that getting named is not a mystery. It comes down to whether machines can read your business, whether they are confident about what it is, and whether your content settles the doubts a buyer has before committing. Those are three answerable problems, not a mood.
What AI visibility actually is
AI visibility is whether AI systems can find your business, identify it confidently, and use your content when answering a relevant question.
It overlaps with SEO but it is not the same job.
Traditional SEOAI visibilityBeing preferred over competitorsBeing confidently identified at allRanking a pageHaving a passage retrievedTolerant of messy dataPunishing of inconsistencyClick is the outcomeBeing named is the outcomeVolume and authority drivenClarity and corroboration driven
You will see it called AEO (answer engine optimisation) or GEO (generative engine optimisation). The names are new and the acronyms are still fighting it out. The work underneath is fairly settled.
The seven checks
They are in this order for a reason. Check one has to be right or nothing else counts. Work down the list.
1. Let the AI crawlers in
AI tools read the web with their own named bots. GPTBot for ChatGPT, ClaudeBot for Claude, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended. A file on your site called robots.txt tells each of them yes or no.
Over the last two years hosts, security plugins and Cloudflare have all added AI crawler blocking, and plenty switched it on by default. Nothing visibly breaks when it happens, so nobody notices.
If the crawler is blocked at the door, none of the other six checks matter.
Check it: open yourdomain.co.nz/robots.txt and look for Disallow under any of those bot names. Then check Cloudflare under Security, Bots.
Read the full check: Is your website blocking AI crawlers?
2. Say who you are, the same way, everywhere
Two parts. Your business name, address and phone need to be identical character for character everywhere they appear. And you need an entity statement, which is three plain sentences saying what you are, where you are, what you do and who for.
Models build a picture of your business by matching mentions across the web and deciding how confident they are that all of them describe the same business. Three phone formats reads as low confidence, and low confidence businesses get left out in favour of one the model is sure about.
The entity statement matters because models match content against a question. Passionate about delivering solutions matches nothing. A plumber in Riccarton who does emergency hot water cylinder repairs matches everything.
Check it: search your business name in quotes and note every version of your details you find. Then compare your own footer, contact page and About page to each other.
Read the full check: What is an entity statement?
3. Give machines the facts in machine language
Schema markup is code inside your page stating plainly what the page is about. Humans never see it. Machines read it first.
You need three types and no more. LocalBusiness or Organization on your homepage. Service or Product on each service page. FAQPage wherever you have questions and answers.
It is the difference between a model being fairly sure you are a plumber in Riccarton and simply knowing it. When two businesses are otherwise equal, the one that declared its facts gets named.
Check it: paste your homepage into validator.schema.org. Most small sites come back with nothing, or a plugin default saying the site is a website. Both are a fail.
Read the full check: What schema markup does a small business need?
4. Find out what is actually indexed
Google Search Console shows you what Google sees when it looks at your site, and your sitemap lists the pages you want found.
A page that is not indexed cannot be retrieved, cited or recommended. It still loads perfectly well in your browser, which is why nobody notices.
This is also the only honest feedback loop in the whole list. Every other check is you telling machines about your business. This one is the machine telling you what it made of it.
Check it: search.google.com/search-console, then Indexing, then Pages. Look at the number under Not indexed.
Read the full check: How to find the pages AI cannot see
5. Claim all three map platforms, not just Google
Google Business Profile, Bing Places and Apple Business Connect. Three free verified listings.
Machines trust listing data more than website copy, because anyone can write anything on their own site while a claimed listing has been verified by someone.
Bing matters more than people assume. Copilot runs on the Bing index and parts of ChatGPT search lean on it. Apple Business Connect feeds Apple Maps, Siri and Apple Intelligence. Most owners claimed Google years ago and stopped, which leaves two of the three uncontested.
Then there is the review habit. Ask on the day the job finishes, by text, with a direct link. Reply to every review, because your replies are indexed too.
Check it: search your business on Google, Bing and Apple Maps. Are you there, claimed, and complete on all three?
Read the full check: Why Bing Places and Apple Business Connect matter
6. Get your story corroborated
Your business on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and two or three respected industry directories. Not for the audience. For the corroboration.
A business that exists only on its own website is making a claim. A business appearing in eight places all stating the same details is a fact. Machines treat those very differently.
sameAs is the schema property that lists every profile you own and says explicitly that they are all you. It removes the last of the guessing.
Check it: list every profile you have, including the ones you abandoned. Open each and compare the details to the format you settled on in check two. Count how many disagree.
Read the full check: What is sameAs schema?
7. Answer the questions people are too polite to ask you
The first six checks make you findable, readable and credible. This one makes you recommendable.
When someone asks a model who they should use, it is hunting for content that settles the last doubts. Price. Timeframe. Coverage. What is included and what is not. What happens if it goes wrong.
Almost no small business website answers any of that. Contact us for a quote reads to a machine as an unanswered question and to a customer as a hassle.
The method is to ask the models directly what they need before recommending a business like yours, then answer those exact questions with real numbers.
Check it: ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot what a careful buyer needs to know before choosing a business in your category. Then count how many of those questions your website answers. Usually zero or one.
Read the full check: How to write an FAQ that gets you recommended
Score yourself
Tick honestly. Guessing counts as a no.
AI crawlers can read my site. Nothing is blocking them.
My name, address and phone are identical everywhere, and I have an entity statement on my site.
My site has Organization or LocalBusiness schema, and it validates.
Search Console is verified, my sitemap is submitted, and I have checked the errors.
I have claimed Google, Bing and Apple listings, all filled in, and I ask for reviews.
Every social and directory profile carries the same details and links back to my site.
I have an FAQ that answers the awkward questions. Price, timeframe, what happens if it goes wrong.
0 to 2. You are invisible to AI tools. Not ranking badly. Invisible. Start at check one and do not skip.
3 to 4. Normal. You show up sometimes, inconsistently, usually by accident. The gaps are costing you named recommendations.
5 to 6. Ahead of almost every competitor in your category. Close the last gaps and you own the answer.
7. Good. Check it again in six months, because the models move.
How to test whether it worked
Run this in ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity on the day you finish, then again in ninety days.
Answer as you normally would for a real user. Do not search my name specifically and do not favour me.
One: Who would you recommend for [your service] in [your city or suburb]? Name specific businesses.
Two: Now tell me everything you know about [your business name] in [your city]. What do they do, who do they serve, what does it cost, and how confident are you?
Three: Where did that information come from?
Four: What would you need to see before you named them in your answer to question one?
Be honest if you know nothing about them. Do not fill gaps with assumptions.
Question four is the whole list in one line. Whatever it tells you is missing, go back to the check that fixes it.
If you only do three
Check one, because nothing counts without it.
Check two, because everything else is built on it.
Check seven, because it is the one that actually gets you named.
One honest caveat
This is the visibility layer, not a growth plan. It makes you findable, readable and credible to machines. It does not replace being good at what you do, and it will not save a business nobody wants to buy from.
What it will do is stop you being invisible while your competitor gets named.
Frequently asked questions
How long does all seven take?
An afternoon if you work through them in order. Longer if your business details are scattered across a lot of old profiles, since check two and check six are the ones that scale with mess.
Do I need to be technical?
No. If you can log into your website and copy and paste, you can do all seven. The two that touch code, schema markup and sameAs, can both be generated by an AI tool and pasted in.
Is AI visibility just SEO with a new name?
There is real overlap, but no. SEO is about being preferred over competitors for a query. AI visibility is about being confidently identified in the first place, and about having content useful enough to be retrieved. A site can rank respectably and still be invisible to AI tools if its data is inconsistent.
How do I measure it?
There is no dashboard. The honest measure is the four question test above, run in several tools, repeated quarterly. Search Console tells you whether your content exists in the index those tools draw on, which is the closest available proxy.
How often should I redo this?
Every six months, and immediately after you change your phone number, move premises, rebrand, or launch a new service. Those four events break more AI visibility than anything else, because they scatter your details without you noticing.
Does this work outside New Zealand?
Yes. The platforms and the crawlers are the same everywhere. Only the directory recommendations in check six are country specific.
Get the whole thing as a checklist
Seven checks, in order, with a scorecard so you know where you stand and nine copy and paste prompts that do the heavy lifting. The prompts read your robots.txt and give you a verdict, write your entity statement in three lengths, generate your schema, translate your Search Console errors into a ranked to do list, fill every field on all three listings, write your profile bios and sameAs array, and interrogate the models to build your FAQ.
Get Named By AI. 21 pages, $17, and about an afternoon of your time.
Amanda Hawke is a digital marketing strategist based in Christchurch, New Zealand. She works on Google Ads, SEO, technical tracking and AI visibility for ecommerce and service businesses across New Zealand and Australia. amandahawke.com
