Make your business easy for AI to read
A customer used to find you by searching, clicking your site and looking around. More and more, they skip all of that. They ask an AI assistant, and the assistant reads your site for them, pulls out what it needs and gives them an answer. They may never land on your page at all.
That changes what your website is for. It's not just a brochure for people anymore. It's a source of facts for machines that are deciding, on someone's behalf, who to recommend.
People can put up with a messy website. We click around, squint at an old FAQ and dig through a PDF. An AI assistant doesn't work that way. If your pricing is hidden, your services are vague or your answers are buried, it guesses, or it recommends the business down the street whose information is clear.
Ask the questions your customers are asking
The simplest test I know is to ask AI about yourself. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Grok and ask the questions a real customer would ask: who's the best in my area for this job, what does it cost, who's it for, how do they compare. Then read the answers honestly.
You might not show up at all. You might show up with the wrong price or the wrong service area. A competitor might get recommended because their information is cleaner. Any of those tells you exactly what to fix, and it's better to find out from a screenshot than from a slow month.
What we can do this week
If you run a small business, here's where I'd start:
- Say what you do in plain words. List your services, where you work and who you're a good fit for. Skip the slogans. “Roof repair and replacement in Marietta” beats “excellence in every project.”
- Put real numbers where you can. Even a price range helps. If AI can't find your pricing, it may make one up.
- Answer the questions people actually ask. Write short, direct answers to your real customer questions and keep them on the page, not in a PDF.
- Keep it current. Old hours, old prices and old services get repeated back to customers as if they were true.
- Check again every month. Ask the same questions, see what changed and fix the next thing.
Where this is going
I think this goes further than recommendations. AI agents are starting to do real work for people: comparing, booking and eventually paying. There's early work on letting software pay a website a fraction of a penny for a piece of data or a tool, with no checkout page at all. I don't know how fast that will arrive. But the direction is clear. The businesses that are easy for an agent to understand, trust and compare will get chosen. The ones that are hard to read will get skipped.
That's why the AI Check exists. It looks at a business's website and scores whether AI assistants are likely to recommend it, then shows what to fix. Our own site should pass it too.
You don't need a big project to start. Ask AI about your business today, write down what it gets wrong, and fix one thing. Then do it again next month.