Before you start: what you are actually doing
You are not submitting your business to anything. There is no registration form for AI answers, no console, no approval queue. What you are doing is improving the evidence that these systems draw on, so that when one of them tries to answer a question in your category, the most usable material it finds happens to be about you.
That framing keeps expectations sane. It also explains the order of the work below: facts first, because contradictions undermine everything else; then your own content; then outside corroboration; then the technical plumbing that lets any of it be read.
Step one: settle your facts, then make them consistent
Write down, in one document, the details you want any system to state about your business: legal and trading name, what you do, what you deliberately do not do, the areas you serve, how long you have operated, licences or registrations, and how you are contacted. Get somebody with authority to confirm each line.
Then audit every place those facts already appear — your own pages, industry directories, professional registers, social profiles, old landing pages, PDFs — and correct the ones that disagree. This is tedious and it is the single highest-value step, because a system comparing three sources that contradict each other about your service area is most likely to hedge, or to name a business it is more confident about.
Pay particular attention to name collisions. If another business shares your trading name, or your name resembles a well-known one, ambiguity is your main enemy and explicit distinguishing detail — location, registration number, specialism — is the remedy.
Step two: publish a source of truth on your own site
Give the settled facts a permanent home: a substantial page that states them plainly, in prose a stranger could quote without adding context. An "about" page will do, provided it is written as information rather than atmosphere. Paragraphs that begin "we are passionate about" tell a retrieval system nothing it can use.
Two habits make this page genuinely useful. First, say what you do not do — the exclusions, the work you refer elsewhere, the areas outside your coverage. Negative facts are rare on the web and they prevent confident misdescription. Second, date the page and keep it current, because a system weighing two contradictory claims has little to go on besides recency.
Step three: answer the questions buyers actually ask
List the questions people ask before choosing a business like yours — not keywords, whole questions, in their words. What does this cost, roughly, and what drives the price. How long does it take. What goes wrong and how is it handled. Do you work with businesses of my size. What qualifications should I insist on.
Answer each one properly, with the answer in the opening sentences and a question-shaped heading above it. Avoid the reflex of bundling twenty thin answers into one FAQ block; a question worth winning deserves a section, and a section that could be lifted out and still make sense. This is the editorial craft covered in our explainer on answer engine optimisation.
Be honest where honesty is uncomfortable — ranges instead of fake precision on price, conditions instead of guarantees. Anything you state plainly can be repeated to a buyer as fact with your name attached, which is an argument for only stating what you can defend.
Step four: earn corroboration you do not control
A claim that appears only on your own website is the weakest kind of claim. The goal is agreement between independent sources, which you pursue through the ordinary, slow routes rather than anything synthetic.
- Keep your entries on legitimate industry directories, professional bodies and public registers current and identical to your source of truth.
- Make sure anything genuinely newsworthy — a new capability, a notable project, a qualification — is documented somewhere that is not your own site.
- Contribute real expertise where your industry publishes it: trade publications, association guidance, technical explainers. Substance, attributed to a named person, is what gets quoted.
- Encourage genuine customer reviews through the platforms you already use, and never fabricate or incentivise them.
- Make sure any partner, supplier or franchise listing describes you the way you describe yourself.
Step five: make the site machine-readable
The technical layer is modest but non-negotiable. Pages should render their text without requiring a script to run, use real headings and real lists, and be reachable from a current sitemap. Structured data — schema markup, the standard vocabulary for labelling what a page is about — should cover your organisation, locations, services and FAQ content, and must match the visible text exactly.
Then check your robots.txt deliberately. Several AI platforms operate separately named crawlers, some for training and some for answering a user’s question in real time, and it is common to find one blocked by an old rule nobody remembers adding. Decide consciously which you permit; blocking a retrieval crawler while hoping to appear in its answers is the most common self-inflicted wound in this field.
Step six: check, wait, and check again
Do not judge the work from a single conversation with one assistant. Build a fixed set of buyer questions, ask them repeatedly across the platforms your customers actually use, and record what happens — which is a discipline in itself, set out in our article on measuring AI visibility.
Give it time. Retrieval-based answers can reflect changes within weeks; anything sitting in a model’s internal knowledge can take much longer, and no platform publishes a schedule. Re-measure on a regular cadence rather than after every edit, and if you have limited capacity, use the prioritisation approach in how to improve your AI visibility to decide what to do first.
Last reviewed 12 August 2026. AI Says is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity or other AI and search providers; platform names are used descriptively.