When someone asks an AI assistant which consultant, agency or supplier to use, how the assistant chooses who to recommend is not mysterious, but it is different enough from search that most marketing habits do not transfer. Search returned a page of options and let the person choose. An assistant returns an answer, and often a name. If it is not your name, there is no second place to be seen in.
The mechanics vary by product, but the shape is consistent. There is what the model absorbed during training, and there is a live retrieval step where it fetches current pages before answering. Those two behave very differently and it is worth being clear about which one you can affect.
- 1Interpretworks out what is really being asked
- 2Retrievefetches candidate pages it can read
- 3Corroborateprefers claims that appear in more than one place
- 4Draftwrites the answer from what survived
- 5Attributenames sources and businesses
It has to be able to read you
This is the unglamorous one and it disqualifies more businesses than anything else. A lot of modern sites send an almost empty HTML file and build the page with JavaScript in the browser. Search engines handle that reasonably well now. Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript at all, so they receive a page with your navigation and nothing else.
If that is your site, you are not competing badly. You are absent. Check it the crude way: fetch one of your pages without a browser and read what comes back. If your argument is not in there, no amount of writing will help until it is.
It has to be able to corroborate you
Assistants are built to avoid asserting things they cannot support. A claim that appears only on your own website is a claim from an interested party. The same claim appearing in an industry publication, a client case study on someone else's domain, a directory, a podcast transcript and a conference listing is a claim with corroboration.
This is why the traditional advice to publish more on your own blog only goes so far. Your own domain establishes what you say about yourself. Other people's domains establish whether it is true. Both matter, and most businesses over-invest in the first.
It has to be able to attribute you
An assistant that wants to name a business needs an unambiguous entity to name. If your consultancy trades under one name, invoices under another, and appears on LinkedIn as a third, you have made attribution harder than it needs to be. Consistent naming, a consistent description, and structured data that says plainly who you are and what you do all help resolve you to a single thing worth naming.
What to actually do first
- Confirm your pages serve real content without JavaScript. Everything else is wasted until this is true.
- Put a plain answer near the top of pages that answer a question, before the argument for it.
- Fix your entity: one name, one description, consistent across your site, your profiles and your listings.
- Get mentioned somewhere you do not control. One credible third-party mention outperforms a month of your own posts.
- Add structured data that states what you do and where, so there is nothing to infer.
None of this is a trick and none of it is quick. It is the same work that made a business findable before assistants existed, with the ordering changed and much less tolerance for a site that cannot be read. If you want to see where you currently stand, the free AI visibility checker runs the readability and citation checks in about a minute, and the AI search readiness checklist is the longer version to work through.
Google's own guidance on this has been consistent and worth reading directly rather than through a summary. Their structured data documentation (opens in a new tab) explains what they use and what they ignore, which cuts through a lot of the advice being sold at the moment.