People ask an assistant who to call and get back three names. Nobody has told most business owners that this is happening, or that it is measurable.
For twenty years there was one question that mattered: where do we come up on Google. There are four now, and most businesses are only watching the first.
- Google Search. Still the biggest, still the one people check.
- Google Maps. A different system with different rules, covered in this piece.
- AI assistants. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot. People ask them who to use and get a short list.
- Your own website. None of the other three matters on a day your site is down or too slow to load.
The third one is new enough that there is very little honest writing about it, and a great deal of nonsense. Here is what is actually going on.
What an assistant is doing when it recommends somebody
Two different things, and the difference matters.
Sometimes it answers from memory: whatever it absorbed when it was trained. That is why an assistant can describe a business that has been around for decades in surprising detail and has never heard of the one that opened last year. You cannot edit that memory directly and neither can anybody else, whatever they are charging.
More often now, it searches. It runs a handful of queries, reads a few pages, and writes an answer from what it found, with links. That half is entirely winnable, because it comes down to what is on the open web about you and how easy it is to read.
Your website now has two kinds of reader
A person skims. A machine parses. For years you only had to design for the first, because Google was patient enough to work the rest out. Assistants are less patient and far more literal.
Which means the things that were always good practice have gone from good practice to load bearing:
- Say what you do, where you do it and who for, in plain sentences on the page, not in a picture of text and not only in a video.
- Put your name, address and phone in the markup, not just in the footer graphic.
- Answer the actual questions customers ask, in the words they ask them. A page that answers a question gets quoted. A page of adjectives does not.
- Keep facts consistent everywhere. An assistant that finds two different phone numbers for you will usually just use somebody else.
llms.txt and structured data, in plain terms
Two small technical files do a disproportionate amount of work here.
Structured data is a block of machine readable information in your pages that states, unambiguously, that you are a business of a certain type, at a certain address, with certain services. Visitors never see it. Every engine reads it. Most small business sites either have none or have one that was generated wrong and quietly contradicts the page.
llms.txt is a plain text file at the root of your site that describes the business and lists the pages worth reading. It is a young convention and not every engine uses it yet. It costs almost nothing to publish and it is the clearest statement you can make about what you are.
Being specific beats being everywhere
The instinct is to try to be mentioned as widely as possible. In practice assistants reward the opposite. “A marketing agency” is a description that fits ten thousand businesses and gets recommended for none of them. “A marketing agency in Lexington, South Carolina that builds websites and mobile apps for local service businesses” is a description that gets returned when somebody asks for exactly that.
The narrower and more concrete your own description of yourself, the more often it matches a real question.
How to check where you stand
You can do a rough version this afternoon, free. Open three assistants and ask each the question a customer would ask, without naming yourself: who would you recommend for [what you sell] in Lexington, South Carolina? Write down who comes up. Then ask each one what do you know about [your business name]? and write down what it says, including anything that is wrong.
Two things usually come out of that. The first is that you are not on the list. The second, more often than you would expect, is that the assistant confidently describes a different business with a similar name.
Doing it once tells you where you are. Doing it every month tells you whether anything you are doing is working, which is why we measure it as a number rather than as a feeling.
What to actually do
- Write a one paragraph description of the business that names what you do, where, and who for. Put it on the home page and the about page in those words.
- Get structured data on the site and check it validates.
- Publish an llms.txt.
- Answer your ten most common customer questions on the site, each as its own heading.
- Fix every place your details disagree with each other across the web.
That is the whole job, and it is the same work that makes you easier for a person to understand. If you want it measured monthly alongside your search and map visibility, that is what the growth program does.