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."
Two things fall out of that. The second one 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
Pew Research Center actually went and measured this. They tracked the browsing of 900 US adults through March 2025, across 68,879 Google searches, and found the three most-cited sources in AI summaries were Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit — together about 15% of everything those summaries pointed at.
Wikipedia. YouTube. Reddit. Your homepage isn't anywhere on that list.
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 assistant on earth. 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.
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 one properly peer-reviewed piece of work in this field is a 2024 paper out of Princeton, IIT Delhi and Georgia Tech 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.
That was measured against the engines of 2024 and I wouldn't bet the exact numbers still hold. 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.
In that same Pew study, 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. Do that math for a second: get yourself quoted in a hundred AI answers and roughly one person clicks through.
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. Open your robots.txt and see what it's blocking. Search your own business name and confirm your site actually comes up. Claim your Google Business Profile if you never got round to it, and get the details right, because for local recommendations it's the most authoritative description of you that exists anywhere.
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. But it's finite work, most of it costs nothing, and unlike a website redesign it stays fixed once you've fixed 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. Thirty-three entries, neatly organised, 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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