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How to Be Found in AI: A Practical Playbook
There is no single trick that gets a business found in AI. There are a handful of levers, most of them ordinary good practice, and a way to tell whether pulling them moved anything.
The short answer
To work toward being found in AI, make sure AI crawlers can read your site, say plainly on your pages what you do, where and for whom, get described the same way on review sites, directories and your Google Business Profile, cover Bing as well as Google, and measure the answers before and after each change. This does not guarantee a mention, but it removes the reasons to leave you out.
Make sure AI tools can read your site
Before anything else, check that the tools can get in. AI companies reach websites through named crawlers, and a robots.txt rule, a firewall or a bot-protection setting can turn them away without anything on your side looking wrong. Key text that only appears after JavaScript runs may also be invisible to some of them.
Once they can read the page, help them understand it. Structured data, the schema.org markup that states your business type, address, hours and services in a form machines can parse, does not guarantee anything, but it removes guesswork about the basic facts.
In depth: Making Your Website Readable to AI Crawlers →
In depth: Structured Data That Helps AI Tools Understand You →
Answer the question on the page
When an AI tool reads your page to answer a customer, it is looking for sentences it can use. A page that opens with a clear, specific answer ('We are a family dental practice in South Tampa, open Saturdays, taking most PPO plans') gives it something to repeat. A page that opens with a slogan gives it nothing.
Write the pages your customers' questions point to: a page per main service, a page per area you serve, and an honest FAQ. Put the answer first and the detail after it.
Be described the same way everywhere else
AI tools rarely rely on your website alone. They read review sites, directories, local news, trade associations and your Google Business Profile. When those sources agree on your name, address, services and what you are known for, a tool has several independent places confirming the same facts. When they disagree, it has less to go on.
So the work outside your site matters as much as the work on it: claim and complete your listings, keep your profile current, ask happy customers for reviews that mention the service and the area, and look for the sites that keep describing your competitors.
In depth: Earning Mentions on Reviews, Directories and Press →
In depth: Google Business Profile and Reviews for Local AI Answers →
Do not leave Bing out
It is easy to treat Google as the whole web. Microsoft's Copilot draws on Bing, and other tools use Bing results too, so a site that Bing has never properly crawled is a site some AI answers cannot see. Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools and submitting your sitemap takes little time and closes that gap.
In depth: Bing Webmaster Tools and Why Bing's Index Matters →
Measure, change one thing, measure again
Effort without measurement is guesswork. Pick the questions your customers really ask, record what each AI tool says today, make one change, and look at the answers over the following weeks. Answers shift on their own as models update, so look at the trend across several scans rather than reacting to one.
Found in AI is built for this loop. It scans your tracked questions across five AI tools on a monthly or weekly schedule, depending on your plan, shows what changed since your last scan, and lists the gaps where a competitor is named and you are not, each with a suggestion of what to publish.
In depth: Choosing Which Questions to Track →
Your checklist
- Open your robots.txt and confirm you are not blocking the AI crawlers you want to reach you
- Rewrite the first lines of your homepage to say what you do, where, and for whom
- Make sure each main service and each area you serve has a page that answers it directly
- Check that your name, address and phone match on your site, Google and your main directories
- Ask recent customers for reviews that mention the service they used and where
- Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap
- Record a baseline of AI answers before you change anything, then compare over several scans
Common questions
How long does it take to be found in AI?
There is no fixed timeline, and no one can promise a result. Crawlers revisit on their own schedules and models update on theirs, so changes can take weeks to show up in answers, and some never move them. That is why tracking the trend matters.
Do I need to rebuild my website?
Usually not. Most of the levers are fixes to what you already have: unblocking crawlers, rewriting the opening of key pages, adding missing service or area pages, and cleaning up your listings elsewhere.
Is this different from SEO?
It overlaps a lot. Readable pages, clear answers and consistent listings help with Google too. The difference is what you measure: whether AI answers name you, rather than where a page ranks.
Where should I start?
Start by measuring. Knowing which questions name a competitor and not you tells you which lever to pull first, instead of working through every item on this list at once.
Read next
What Does It Mean to Be Found in AI?
More customers now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity who to hire before they ever open a search page. Being found in AI is about what those answers say about you.
Read the guide →What to Track to Be Found in AI
Checking one AI tool on your phone tells you almost nothing. To know whether you are found in AI, you need a fixed set of questions, every major tool, and the same measurements every time.
Read the guide →How AI Assistants Decide Which Businesses to Mention
Nobody outside the AI companies knows exactly how an answer is put together. What they have published, and what you can observe, still tells you a lot about where to put your effort.
Read the guide →See where you stand today.
Found in AI asks five AI tools the questions your customers ask and shows where you are named, where you are linked and where a competitor is named instead.