Originally published on the NuWay Biz Solutions blog.
✦ Cover image: Made with ChatGPT Images 2.0 — we're transparent about AI. See the exact prompt on the original post.
Somebody sat down and typed this into Google, in a full sentence, the way you'd ask an actual person:
our website hasn't been updated in a while — could that be the reason ai tools don't mention us?
— A real search query, August 2026
You can hear it, can't you. That's not a keyword. That's somebody who's had a suspicion gnawing at them for a while and finally said it out loud to a search box at some point in the evening.
So let's answer it properly, because a lot of people have this backwards.
Short version: yes, a neglected website is a factor. It's also the smallest thing on the list, and going after it first is how businesses spend four grand on a redesign and stay exactly as invisible as they were.
The picture most owners have in their head is a bot that swings past the website, has a look around, decides the place seems abandoned, and moves on. A health inspector with a clipboard.
Nothing like that is happening.
What's actually going on is stranger, and once you can see it the whole thing stops being mysterious.
What the assistant actually reads
Say you ask ChatGPT to recommend a bookkeeper in your town. It doesn't sit there and think about bookkeepers. It runs a search, reads what comes back, and writes you a summary of that.
Google's AI Overviews do the same against Google's index. Google says as much in its own guide for site owners: the generative features are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems," working from "publicly accessible, crawlable content."
There's a conclusion in that sentence people skip past. If the AI features run on the same ranking systems as ordinary search, then everything that made you rank still counts. This isn't a separate game you can win while losing the old one. The assistant is largely picking from what search already surfaces.
Two more things fall out of it, and the second surprises people.
First, if a machine can't reach your pages, nothing else on this list matters. Worth actually checking rather than assuming, because a lot of small-business sites quietly block crawlers through a security plugin or some firewall setting nobody remembers switching on.
Second, and this is the one: most of what the AI reads about you, you didn't write.
What owners picture
- The AI visits your website
- It reads your homepage and your services page
- It judges whether the business looks current
- A recent redesign moves the needle
What usually happens
- It runs a search and reads the results
- Most of those results are pages about you, not yours
- It looks for several sources agreeing
- Your homepage is one input among many, if it shows up at all
Think about what actually comes back when somebody searches for a business like yours. Most of it wasn't written by that business. It's other people's pages, maintained by other people, on their own schedule and to their own standard.
The assistant reads that pile and summarises it. Your own site is one voice in there, and frequently not the loudest one.
One thing genuinely worth doing today, though. ChatGPT search runs its own crawler, and OpenAI is blunt about it in its documentation: "OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features," and "sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers."
Which means there's a plain text file sitting at the root of your website quietly deciding whether you exist inside the most-used AI assistant there is. Go and look at it.
It has to be sure you are one business
Alright. Say the assistant does find you. Four pages mention your business: a directory listing, an old chamber-of-commerce page, a review site, and your own homepage.
Something now has to work out that all four are the same company.
Sounds like nothing. Go and look.
Search your own business the way a stranger would, and what you'll usually turn up is the name spelled three different ways, two phone numbers (one of which still rings a mobile you replaced in 2021), an address from the office you moved out of, and a description of what you do that stopped being true a couple of years ago.
Every one of those was correct the day somebody typed it.
Google asks for consistency in about as plain a sentence as Google writes, in its Business Profile guidelines: "Your name should reflect your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers."
Consistently is carrying an awful lot of weight in that sentence.
Our read, and I'll flag it as ours because nobody's published a study measuring this for businesses your size: this is where small companies actually come unstuck. Not from being too quiet. From being described four slightly different ways by four sources that never compared notes.
Which is the same thing we keep going on about, arriving from outside the building. The facts about your business are data too. They just live in systems you don't own, and they disagree with each other. Inside your company that gets you a wrong invoice. Outside it, it gets you silence.
✦ Made with ChatGPT Images 2.0 — we're transparent about AI. See the exact prompt on the original post.
Why it names your competitor and not you
There's a harder version of this question, and it's the one people actually ask. Not "does it know I exist". It's "somebody asked which companies do this, it named four, and I wasn't one of them."
Different problem. Being findable and being picked are two different jobs.
When you ask an assistant who to use for something, it goes looking for pages that already answer that question. Registers of businesses do exist, plenty of them, from your state licensing board to the Secretary of State, and an assistant reaching for a recommendation is not reading those. It reads the pages people read: directories, review platforms, somebody's "best in town" roundup, an association's member page, a trade body's find-a-supplier search, and the forum thread where somebody asked this exact question two years ago.
It reads a few of those and tells you what they said.
That follows from the thing Google already told us further up, that its AI features are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems over crawlable pages. If a recommendation is built that way, the pages it reaches for are the pages already ranking for who to use. Two honest limits on that: it's reasoning from their sentence rather than a study, and it's Google's sentence, so it covers Google. Nobody publishes the equivalent for ChatGPT. You can also just check it yourself, which beats both.
Ask an assistant to recommend someone in your trade and your town, then look at what it cites. Those citations are the answer to this entire section. They're the pages you need to be on, listed for you, by the thing you're trying to get listed in.
Most of the time your competitor is simply on three of those pages while you're on none. Better known has very little to do with it.
And the bit that stings, if you've been at this twenty years: none of those lists care. A reputation built on referrals, repeat customers and people recommending you at the school gate is a genuinely better business than a directory profile. It's also invisible here. Word of mouth doesn't have a URL.
Being long-established can even work against you, in a small way. More years means more old profiles, more half-finished listings somebody made in 2014, more versions of your name floating around. A five-month-old competitor with one clean directory entry and eleven reviews is easier to be sure about than you are.
Easier to be sure about is most of what's being rewarded.
Two things this is not, because both are easy to hear and both are wrong. It isn't a licence to go and manufacture mentions: Google says plainly, a couple of sections down, that seeking inauthentic ones across the web doesn't help as much as you'd think, and a scatter of thin profiles is also how you end up being described five slightly different ways. Accurate and consistent in the few places your buyers actually look beats numerous every time. Which is the same thing the last section asked for, pointed outward.
The file everyone tells you to add
Now, there's a whole industry grown up around this, and a lot of what it sells you is files.
Schema markup. An llms.txt. Structured data packages, billed monthly.
Google's own documentation is ruder about this than I'd be.
From that same guide: "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add." On the AI-specific files: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search." It then says Google Search ignores them.
And one more, worth reading twice if anybody's offered to go and build you brand mentions at scale: "Seeking inauthentic 'mentions' across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem."
Structured data still earns its keep for ordinary search results, and we put it on client sites. It's just a poor answer to why an assistant skips past you.
So what does move the needle? The most-cited peer-reviewed work in a field that is otherwise mostly vendor blog posts is a paper out of Princeton and IIT Delhi called Generative Engine Optimization, presented at the KDD conference. They ran 10,000 queries and tested nine different ways of rewriting a page to see which got it quoted more often. Adding quotations came out top, then adding statistics, then citing your sources.
Keyword stuffing scored worse than changing nothing at all, which I enjoyed more than I probably should have.
Worth knowing what they actually tested: their own research engine plus Perplexity, back in 2023. Not ChatGPT, not Google. So I wouldn't bet on the exact numbers holding here. The direction is worth having, though, because it's cheap and it repeats: pages that make specific, checkable, quotable claims get quoted. Pages that gesture don't. It's the outward-facing cousin of something we wrote recently about giving a reviewer something concrete to check against.
What a mention is actually worth
Before you go off and do any of this, the honest part.
Pew Research Center measured this on Google, which is the one place anybody has measured it properly. Tracking the browsing of 900 US adults through March 2025, they found that of all the visits to a results page carrying an AI summary, people clicked a source link inside the summary on 1% of them. On those same pages, clicks through to an ordinary search result ran at 8%, against 15% where no summary showed up at all.
One percent, and that's across every source in the summary rather than yours alone. Nearly nine in ten of those summaries cited three or more. So your individual share of that one percent is smaller again.
So if you were planning this as a traffic channel, plan for approximately no traffic.
It's still worth having, just for a different reason than you'd think. A mention behaves like a referral. Somebody asks for a recommendation, your name comes up next to two others, and later they look you up directly or walk into a conversation already knowing you exist. Our read, and it's a read rather than a finding: that visit lands as a direct one, and nothing in your analytics will ever tell you where it came from.
Which makes this a brand problem wearing a technical costume. What you're after is being the name that gets said, and it pays off somewhere you can't see it.
Where to start this week
Check that a machine can reach you. Your robots.txt is the first place to look, and it won't catch everything — a security plugin or a firewall rule can block crawlers somewhere robots.txt never sees, so a clean file isn't the all-clear it looks like. The test that settles it is Search Console's URL Inspection run on the live URL: it tells you what Google actually got when it last called. While you're in there, search your own business name and check your site comes up at all.
Claim your Google Business Profile, if you can have one. Google asks that you either have somewhere customers can visit or that you travel to them, so a fully remote business doesn't qualify and shouldn't spend an afternoon trying. If you do qualify, claim it and get every detail right. For anything local, it's the description of you that carries the most weight.
Make your basic facts agree. Name, one-line description, address, phone. Write the correct version down once, then go and fix the places it's wrong. It's dull, and it's the highest-value hour on this list.
Give the web something worth quoting. One page that answers a real question properly, with actual numbers and named sources, beats ten pages of positioning. If your site says you deliver tailored solutions, there's nothing there for a machine to lift.
The ten-minute version
Ask ChatGPT, then Google, three things: what your business does, whether it can recommend a business like yours in your town, and who the good options are.
Then read the answers for what's wrong, rather than for whether you're in them. A wrong phone number. An old service list. A competitor described in the exact words you use about yourself. That's your to-do list, and you just got it for free.
None of this is quick. Entity information moves slowly, directories update whenever they feel like it, and there's no button. It doesn't stay fixed either — old records get re-pushed, scraped listings regenerate, and anyone can suggest an edit to your Google profile. But it's cheap to keep right once it is right, which is more than a redesign can say, and an hour a quarter covers it.
If you've gone and looked yourself up and didn't much care for what the machine thinks you are, that's worth an hour of conversation. Start a no-pressure conversation about which of your facts we'd straighten out first.
Practical AI. Clear process. Real business value.
— Brian, NuWay Biz Solutions
P.S. This website serves an llms.txt. Neatly organised, carefully maintained, and I was quite pleased with myself, and Google's documentation says Google Search ignores it. So we're taking our own medicine here — working through this exact list on our own business, in public, while telling you to go and do it on yours. I'll report back on what actually moved.
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