Getting found when people ask an AI
A growing share of people looking for a service no longer open a search engine — they describe their problem to an assistant and ask what to use. That produces a shortlist of two or three names, and being on it is a different exercise from ranking in a list of ten blue links.
What is different about being recommended
A search result is a position; a recommendation is a sentence. The model has to be able to say something true and specific about you — who you suit, what you cost, what you do not do — and it will reach for whichever source states that plainly. Businesses that describe themselves only in adjectives give it nothing to say, so it names somebody who was clearer.
What actually helps
Counter-intuitive and the strongest single move. A page that names who should choose something else reads as trustworthy, and it is what gets quoted.
Not "our service offering" but "how much does it cost" and "do you cover my area". Question-shaped content is what gets retrieved.
Prices, coverage areas, timescales. Vague claims are unusable — a model cannot repeat "market-leading" to somebody without risking being wrong.
Blocking automated readers in your robots file removes you from consideration entirely. Worth checking; plenty of sites block them by inheritance rather than decision.
Where the recommendations come from
Largely from the ordinary open web plus whatever the assistant can retrieve at the moment it is asked — your own site, directories, review platforms, forum threads where somebody asked the same question. There is no submission process and nobody to pay, which is unusual and worth appreciating: the leverage is in being genuinely easy to summarise rather than in a budget.
The honest limits
Nobody outside these companies knows the weightings, they change, and anyone selling you a guaranteed placement is selling something they cannot deliver. Treat this as what it is — a set of reasonable inferences about how retrieval works, pointing at things worth doing anyway because they also make your site better for people.
The test worth running
Ask a few assistants the question your customers would ask — "who does X in Y" — and see what comes back. If you are absent, look at who was named and read their site. Usually they are not better at marketing; they are more specific, and specificity is the whole game here.
Frequently asked
Be easy to summarise: state prices, coverage and timescales specifically, answer questions in the words people ask them, and say plainly who you are not for. Vague claims cannot be repeated to somebody.
Because a page that names who should choose something else reads as trustworthy, and that is the kind of statement that gets quoted back to a person asking for advice.
No. There is no submission process and nobody to pay, and anyone guaranteeing placement is selling something they cannot deliver.
Yes — a robots file that blocks automated readers removes you from consideration. Many sites block them by inheritance rather than by decision.
Ask a few assistants the question your customers would ask. If you are absent, read the sites of whoever was named — usually they are simply more specific than you are.