More people now ask an assistant — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google’s AI answers — instead of scrolling a list of links. “Who’s a good emergency electrician near me?” gets a short answer with two or three names. Being one of those names is worth a lot, and you cannot buy it. Here is what is within your control.
First, the honest part: nobody can guarantee a recommendation. Each assistant decides differently, the systems change often, and anyone selling a guaranteed placement is selling something they do not control. What you can do is make your business easy to find, easy to read, and consistent everywhere it appears.
1. Let the crawlers in
Assistants that browse the web send their own crawlers, and some answer from a search index built by them. If your robots.txt or your host’s firewall blocks those crawlers, your site is invisible to them. Check your robots.txt (it lives at yourdomain.com/robots.txt) for rules that block agents such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended, and decide deliberately whether you want them blocked. Some hosting and security products block them by default.
2. Make your pages readable without a browser
Many crawlers read the HTML your server sends and do not run JavaScript. If your services, hours and phone number only appear after scripts load, a crawler may see an empty page. Plain, server-rendered or static HTML is the safest format. A quick test: view the page source in your browser and search for your phone number. If it is not there, a crawler may not see it either.
3. State the facts plainly, in one place
Assistants answer questions like “are they open Sunday?” and “do they serve the next town over?”. They can only answer from what is written down. Make sure your site says, in plain sentences:
- What you do, in the words customers use.
- Where you do it — the towns, neighbourhoods or regions you serve.
- When you are open, and whether you take emergency calls.
- How to reach you, with a phone number in text, not an image.
- Prices or starting prices, if you are willing to publish them.
- Licences, certifications and years in business, where relevant.
Then add structured data (schema.org LocalBusiness, or the more specific type for your trade) that says the same thing in a machine-readable form. It must match the visible page — structured data that contradicts the page is worse than none.
4. Be consistent everywhere else
Assistants cross-check. Your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, industry directories and social profiles should all show the same name, address, phone number and hours as your website. Inconsistency is a reason for a system to trust you less, or to repeat the wrong version.
5. Earn reviews where they are read
Recommendations lean heavily on what other people say about you — reviews on Google, Yelp and trade-specific sites, and mentions in local news or community forums. Ask happy customers for a review, make it easy with a direct link, and reply to the ones you get. Never buy or invent reviews; platforms remove them, and they can damage trust in everything else you publish.
6. Answer the questions people ask
An FAQ section is useful again. Write down the questions customers really ask on the phone — “do you charge for estimates?”, “how soon can you come?”, “do you work on older homes?” — and answer each in two or three sentences. Assistants often quote answers like these almost word for word.
7. Publish an llms.txt and keep facts in a file
llms.txt is a proposed convention: a short plain-text file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that tells AI systems what the site is and where the important pages are. It is not a ranking factor anyone has confirmed, and some assistants may ignore it, but it is cheap and it does no harm. A machine-readable facts file goes further, giving agents the same facts your structured data does in one place.
8. Let agents act, not just read
Assistants are starting to do things on a user’s behalf — ask for a quote, request an appointment. A site that exposes those actions to agents through a standard such as MCP (the Model Context Protocol) is easier for an assistant to send a customer to, because it can finish the job instead of handing over a phone number.
9. Keep it current
An assistant that confidently tells someone you are open on a day you are closed has done you harm. When anything changes, update your site and every profile together.
Where Curb fits
Every site Curb runs ships as fast static HTML with crawlers allowed, structured data, an llms.txt, a facts file and its own public MCP server — all generated from one record of your business, so they cannot disagree with each other. When you change a fact, all of them change together. See how it works, or check your current site with our free audit.
