Signs this is your problem
You don't need all of these. One is usually enough to be losing work you never hear about.
You ask ChatGPT for a business like yours and a competitor comes up
Your site is on Google but never quoted in an AI answer
Your traffic is down and nobody clicked through to find out why
Your site was built with a tool that leaves the page empty until it loads
Nothing on your site directly answers the questions customers actually ask
Your business details differ across your site, Google and your listings
What I actually do
Four pieces of work. No subscriptions to tools you'll never open.
Make the page readable
The assistants behind ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity read your page without running it. If your site builds itself in the visitor's browser, they get an empty shell. I check what they actually receive and fix it.
Write pages worth quoting
AI answers lift short, self-contained passages. That means the answer near the top, questions phrased the way people ask them, and real numbers instead of vague reassurance.
Make your business unambiguous
Structured details about who you are, what you do and where — matching everywhere else you appear online. Assistants recommend businesses they can identify with confidence.
Get cited off your own site
For 'who should I hire' questions, assistants lean on directories, marketplaces and reviews more than on your website. I work on those too, because that's where those answers come from.
I found this on my own site first
I checked what crawlers were being served on this very website and found they were getting a page with none of my content on it. Not a theory I read somewhere — something I tested, diagnosed and wrote up so you can run the same check in half a minute.
Read how to test your own siteCommon questions
Is this different from SEO?
It overlaps, but it isn't the same. Google runs the code on your page and eventually reads it. Most AI crawlers don't run anything — they take the raw page and move on. A site can rank on Google and be completely invisible in ChatGPT.
Can you guarantee I'll show up in ChatGPT?
No, and nobody can. What I can do is make sure you're readable, quotable and identifiable, and then check month to month whether you're appearing and what's being cited instead.
How would I even know if this is a problem?
Open your site, right-click, choose View Page Source, and search for a sentence from your own page. If it isn't there, neither AI assistants nor search engines are reading it.
My site was built with an AI tool. Does that matter?
It can matter a lot. Several popular builders serve crawlers an empty page unless a specific setting is right. I've written up how to test that.