AI is recommending your competitors. Not you.
You asked ChatGPT, or Google's AI, for a recommendation in your own industry. You watched it name a few businesses that do what you do. Yours was not one of them. That is not bad luck. It is a technical problem, and it is one I fix.
Start a ProjectWhat you see is not what the machine reads.
What you see
A finished homepage. Your brand, your work, your services, laid out the way you designed them. It looks complete, so you assume it reads as complete.
What the machine reads
A crawler does not see your design. It reads text, structured data, and the record of who you are and what you do. If that record is thin, buried in images, or blocked, it has nothing about you to quote, so it quotes someone else.
An answer engine cannot recommend what it cannot read. It does not weigh how good your work is. It weighs whether your site states, in a form it can parse, what you do and who you serve. Most sites never do. Whether I built your site or not, that is the gap I close.
How I make your site legible to the machine.
This is unglamorous work, and that is the point. The things an answer engine uses to describe and cite you are boring, specific, and checkable. Here is what I put in place.
Structured data it can parse
I mark up your business, your services, and your pages in JSON-LD schema, the format Google, Bing, and AI assistants read to understand what a page is. Hand-written, not a plugin's guess, and validated against schema.org with zero errors.
An llms.txt file
I publish an llms.txt at your domain root: a plain-text summary of your business, services, and key pages, written for AI tools to read directly.
This site has one. Open it →A crawler access policy
I set your robots.txt so the bots that retrieve and cite content are explicitly allowed: OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User for ChatGPT, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User for Claude, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, alongside the training crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended. A blocked bot cannot cite you, and most sites block them without ever meaning to.
Entity consistency
Your name, phone, location, and the services you offer are stated identically everywhere the machine looks: your site, your schema, your Google Business Profile. When those disagree, it trusts none of them. When they agree, it has one clean record to repeat.
None of this is a trick. It is plumbing. On the sites I build, it is part of how I build, from the first line of code. On a site I did not build, I retrofit it. It is also exactly what gets a business quoted by name instead of skipped.
The words on your pages have to earn the citation too, which is its own craft. And if you run a store, the same reading problem hides in your product and collection data, which is Shopify work.
What I cannot promise, and what I can.
I cannot guarantee that ChatGPT will name your business. No one can, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a certainty they do not have. The models change, their sources shift, and no vendor controls what an AI decides to say.
What I can do is real, and it is enough. I can make sure the machine can reach your site, read it, describe you correctly, and has an accurate record to cite when someone asks about your industry. I control the inputs. I make them clean, complete, and consistent. That is the honest version of this work, and it is the version that actually moves the needle. Every competitor who promises you a guaranteed spot in AI results is promising something they cannot deliver.
Questions about AI search
Why does ChatGPT not know about my business?
Usually because your site does not give it anything to read. AI assistants build answers from text and structured data they can crawl. If your key facts live inside images, load only after a script runs, contradict each other across pages, or sit behind a robots.txt that blocks AI crawlers, the model has no clean record of you to draw on. It is not judging your business. It cannot find it. I fix the inputs so there is something accurate for it to read.
How do I get my business mentioned in AI search?
You make your site legible and quotable to the tools that answer these questions. That means structured data stating plainly what you do and who you serve, an llms.txt summary written for AI to read, a robots.txt that allows the retrieval and citation bots, and the same facts repeated consistently everywhere the machine looks. None of it forces a mention, but a business the machine can read and trust is the only kind it will ever name.
Is AI search optimization different from SEO?
It overlaps with technical SEO and then goes further. Traditional SEO aims to rank a page in a list of links. This aims to make your site readable and citable by an answer engine that skips the list and gives one answer. Clean structure and schema help both. The difference is the goal: not to be the tenth result on a page fewer people scroll, but to be the business the AI names when it answers out loud.
Does this replace my Google rankings?
No. It sits alongside them. People still search Google, and traditional rankings still matter, so I do not trade one for the other. What is changing is that more searches now end with an AI answer instead of a click, and a business invisible to that answer loses ground it cannot see itself losing. This makes sure you show up in both places, not one.
The proof is my own site.
I did not test this on a client first. I tested it on myself, and the result is something you can check. On August 10, 2026, I asked Google's answer engine what Coastform Studio does and what a website here costs, and I wrote down exactly what it said.
What I claim
I am a one-person San Diego studio offering web design, SEO, AI search optimization, copywriting, and Google Ads, and my websites start at $500.
What Google's AI answered
It described a one-person San Diego studio that hand-codes custom sites instead of using templates, and it named five services: web design and development, search engine optimization, AI search optimization, copywriting, and Google Ads. Asked about cost, it answered, word for word, "Websites at Coastform Studio start at $500 for a single-page website," and contrasted that with agencies charging $5,000 to $15,000.
The two columns match. That is the whole goal of this work: when the machine describes you, it describes you correctly, in your words, with your numbers. You can verify mine. Search Coastform Studio, ask an AI what it offers and what it costs, and compare its answer to this page. The exact wording will drift as models update, which is the point. I keep the underlying record accurate, so whatever reads it, reads you right.
One client site is now cited by name in ChatGPT results.
Let's make sure the machine reads you right.
An AI is already answering questions about your industry. Your business should be one it can find, read, and name. That starts with a conversation, whether you need this retrofitted onto your current site or built into a new one. What it costs lives on pricing.
Start a Project Not ready to talk? Read why SEO alone is not enough anymore →