Why AI assistants never mention your business

Somebody asks an assistant for a reliable roofer in their town. It names three. You are not one of them, and unlike a search result there is no report telling you what you missed.

What is actually being read

Some combination of pages it can fetch and parse right now, a training corpus that is months old, and whatever search index it is allowed to consult. All three favour the same thing: text that plainly states a fact, on a page readable without running a browser.

That is the whole game, and it explains why so many perfectly good small business sites are invisible.

The four reasons you are not named

The facts are inside pictures. Services in a graphic, prices in a PDF, the phone number in a header image. A model reading the HTML finds nothing to quote.

The page needs JavaScript to say anything. Plenty of modern sites deliver an empty shell and fill it in the browser. Some crawlers execute that. Many do not.

There is no structured data. The vocabulary that says "this is a plumbing business, in this town, with these hours" is free to add and most small sites have none.

Nobody else mentions you. Assistants corroborate. A business that appears in a trade body list, a supplier page and a local paper is safer to name than one that exists only on its own site.

What you can actually change

Put the facts in text. Add a LocalBusiness structured-data block with the real name, address, hours and service area — an hour of work. Make the details agree everywhere. Then, slowly, be mentioned somewhere that is not yours.

What is measurable today

The first three are facts about your page. The free audit reports whether the title and description exist, whether there is structured data and of what type, and whether the content is actually in the HTML.

Related: what an audit actually checks and getting found in your own town.

The structured data block, in full

This is the part people skip because it looks technical. It is fifteen lines and it does more for machine legibility than any other single change:

• The type of business, from the standard vocabulary — LocalBusiness, Restaurant, Plumber, whatever fits.
• The legal name, exactly as it appears everywhere else.
• The full address, and the geographic area you serve.
• The telephone number, in one format.
• Opening hours.
• The URL of your own site.

Any competent developer adds this in under an hour, and most site builders have a field for it that nobody has filled in.

How to tell whether it worked

You cannot ask an assistant whether it can see you and get a reliable answer — it will produce a confident reply either way. What you can check is whether the facts are readable: view the page source and look for your phone number as text. If it is not there, no amount of prompting changes anything.