|
In this issue
|
Have you ever asked ChatGPT or Claude about yourself or your business? If you have, you most likely didn't like the answers, found nothing, or found information that was wrong. But did you know that you can fix what the AI assistants say about your business in one afternoon?
It comes down to five fixes on things you already control: the words on your homepage, the small boxes behind it that say who you are, one text file written for the machines, the setting that lets the right machines in, and your Google and Yelp listings.
I ran the list on my own site one afternoon in August and fixed what I could. This issue is that list.
If you want to be a part of the answer when Claude or ChatGPT respond, you should read this.
Five fixes so AI assistants get your business right A check and a fix for each, no coding needed. |
Four weeks ago I showed you the check: ask two AI assistants five questions about your business, the way a customer would ask them, and score the answers. Two of the three businesses I ran it on came back with the wrong owner. Most of the mistakes traced back to a page the owner could have changed that same day.
If you have ever paid for search engine work, you have seen the two new acronyms by now: AEO, answer engine optimization, and GEO, generative engine optimization. They have the same job: making you one of the businesses an AI assistant names in its answer when a customer asks. The five fixes below are that job, done in an afternoon.
An assistant never walks into your shop. The assistant reads about you, and what was written about you and the reading list is short: the words on your website a machine can see, the hidden fields behind each page, your Google and Yelp listings and other web listings, and any old mentions or incorrect information still lying around. Thin or stale pages make a thin or stale answer. Fix them in this order.
The five fixes · in order 1. Give the AI assistant words it can read. The check: open Claude or ChatGPT, paste in your homepage address, and ask for what the business does, who owns it and where it is, from that page only. A vague or wrong answer means the machine never saw your text. Many website builders draw your webpage with code that an AI assistant can't read, so a page that is well designed, looks pretty and full of content to a human, might give Claude or ChatGPT almost nothing. My membership page handed over about 100 words and no prices. The fix: one plain paragraph near the top of the homepage, in real text, that says who owns the business, what you do, where, since when, and for whom. Then run the check again. 2. Say who you are in the fields the AI assistants read first. Every page carries a few fields the visitor never sees: the site name, a one-line description, and a hidden card in the code that says this is a business, owned by this person, at this address. Google showed my web address where my name should have been because that card was empty. The check: search your own business name and look at what Google shows as the name and the line under it. The fix: one sentence that says what you are and for whom, the same sentence in every box that asks. The hidden card is a short job for whoever built your site. 3. Write the one page that is only for the AI assistants. It is a plain text file at your web address called llms.txt, and it lists what you sell, what it costs, and one line for every page on your site. Ten minutes, no code. Fair warning: nobody has shown an assistant reads it yet, which is why it gets ten minutes and not a day. The template I used is the download at the end of this issue, and the file gets decoded further down, including who actually reads it. 4. Let the right crawlers in. Two settings decide which machines can read your site: a file called robots.txt and your hosting company's bot rules. Some hosts now block AI crawlers unless you say otherwise. Cloudflare, the traffic layer many hosts put in front of their sites, changes its defaults for new sites on 15 September: bots that train models or act for a user get blocked on pages that show ads, and search crawlers stay allowed. Check with your web or IT person: are OpenAI's, Anthropic's and Google's search bots allowed to read us? The fix is a settings page. While they are in there, have them hide the pages that are not your business, the login page and the password reset page, so a machine does not read those as you. 5. Fix the sources the assistants read directly. Your Google Business Profile and your Yelp page are read by the assistants directly. Google says a current profile helps you show up in its AI answers, and Yelp signed a deal in July to feed ChatGPT. Owner name, category, hours, photos, phone number, all current, and the same name, address and phone on every listing, spelled the same way. Then the listings you forgot you had: Apple Maps, which Siri reads; Bing Places, which Copilot reads; your Facebook page; your LinkedIn company page. Then the sites for your trade: the directories, review sites and association pages that list businesses like yours, because the assistants lean on those lists for the “who is the best” answers. Search your business name once and note which of them still show the old owner, the old address, or a service you stopped offering. Most have a form to claim or correct a listing, some need an email, and all of it is asking, not building. Then Reddit, where people ask for recommendations in plain words. Google pays Reddit about $60 million a year to read those answers, and OpenAI has a deal of its own. You cannot edit what other people wrote there, but you can answer questions in your trade under your own name. Last, the old mentions on pages you own: the press quote that still names the previous owner, the awards page that stops in 2021. Date them, update them, or take them down. Your own pages first, because those change today. A directory takes a form and a wait. |
Three more that are not fixes, but they move the answer. Ask your happiest customers for a review that names the service and the town, because the assistants quote reviews and count them. Write an About page in plain words with the owner's name and how long you have been at it, since that is the page an assistant checks when the question is who runs the place. And get named on pages you do not own: a local news mention, an association member list, a supplier's customer page. The “who is the best” answers are built from lists other people wrote.
Then rerun the check in thirty days, same five questions, same two assistants, and see what moved. I have not met a business owner who has run this check, and nobody has won this yet.
I ran the list on my own site Which of the five fixes I could do on my own site, and the one I could not. |
It started with a search. In August I typed the name of this newsletter into Google and got a gray globe where my logo should be and my web address where my name should be. So I ran my own check on my own site.
The finding was worse than I thought. My sales pages are long files of code, and an AI assistant reading the membership page gets about 100 words of text and not one price. An outside research tool read my company site fine, then read the newsletter site and learned nothing. I had been writing for people and hiding all of it from the machines.
What I completed that afternoon, by fix number. Fix 2, the fields the machines read first: every page on the newsletter site had its own version of my one-line description, four different ones in all. I replaced them with one sentence, the same everywhere. Also fix 2: when someone shares a page in a text or on LinkedIn, the preview shows a title, a line of text and a picture. Fourteen of those slots across five pages were empty. I filled them, and one picture that still said “Four ways” on a page listing five got replaced.
The one thing I could not fix. Fix 2 has a second half: a hidden card in the code that tells Google this is a business, with an owner and an address. The builder my newsletter site runs on has no place to put it, so on that site Google keeps showing my web address where my name belongs. My company site carries the card, so the fix is done there.
Fix 3: the file written only for the machines went live, about 6,000 characters, prices included. Fix 4: eight pages that are not my business, the login page and its cousins, are now hidden from search, so a machine does not read a password screen as me. Fix 1 and fix 5, the homepage paragraph and my listings, are still on my list.
The thirty-day rerun of my own check, the five questions from Issue 13, is due now. Whatever it says goes in a future issue.
Four things to read worth your time ChatGPT reads sites itself, Google checks your listing, and where customers ask now. |
ChatGPT now reads your website itself. OpenAI has built its own index of the web, and two researchers at one AI-search analytics firm watched its crawler work through a test site they built: six million pages read by early September, at about 35,000 requests an hour. Showing up in ChatGPT used to mean showing up in Bing, and their read of ChatGPT's own traffic says that link has weakened. So fixes 1 and 4 above matter more than they did in spring, because the crawler reads your site directly now. Peec AI, September 4 · one analytics vendor's read, not an OpenAI statement
Google is emailing owners: does this look right to you? When someone on Google Maps suggests a change to your business listing, a new name, say, Google now emails the owner and gives you four days to say yes or no. That listing is one of the first things an AI assistant reads about you. Find out which inbox those emails land in, and who watches it. Search Engine Roundtable, September 8 · seroundtable.com
Which assistants to check, by the numbers. Web traffic to AI sites in August: ChatGPT 55.5 percent, Gemini 25.6, Claude 9.3, Perplexity under 1. Phone apps are not counted, so Gemini on Android and ChatGPT on the phone are bigger than this. For the monthly check, ChatGPT and Gemini are the two to open, with Claude third. Similarweb data, via The Decoder, September 7 · the-decoder.com
Google now writes almost every “People also ask” answer itself. The question boxes under a Google search used to quote a business's FAQ page. This month, 97 percent of those answers are written by Google's AI from whatever it can read, up from about 12 percent just over a year ago. Your FAQ page is now source material for a machine, so write each answer as one plain paragraph a machine can lift whole. Search Engine Roundtable, September 9 · seroundtable.com
The acronyms: AEO and GEO Two names for one job, and the question that sorts a real offer from a relabel. |
SEO was search engine optimization: the work of ranking in Google's list of links. AEO is answer engine optimization and GEO is generative engine optimization, and both describe the newer job: being the business an AI assistant names, correctly, when somebody asks. Two names exist because the field is young and the vocabulary has not settled. But you need to know what the line item means when it lands on a marketing invoice, because it is coming.
The real work is the five fixes above, and you can do those yourself. Some of what gets sold as AEO/GEO is last year's search retainer with a new label. Two questions sort them. Which of the five fixes will you do for us, and which exact questions will you rerun every month to show it worked?
The file: llms.txt What it is, what goes in it, and who actually reads it. |
You will start seeing this file name in proposals from web people and marketing vendors. It is a plain text file at your web address, yourbusiness.com/llms.txt, written for AI crawlers rather than for people. Jeremy Howard proposed the idea in September 2024, and the shape is simple: your business name, one sentence on what you do and for whom, then what you sell with prices, then one line per page on your site with its address. Mine runs about 6,000 characters. Download the template and fill in the blanks.
Google says its search ignores the file. OpenAI and Anthropic each publish one for their own documentation and say nothing about reading anyone else's. The only public evidence that an assistant fetches it is one site owner's server logs from last year, showing OpenAI's crawler checking the file on a few of his sites. Ten minutes of work, no harm done, and no promise that anyone reads it yet. If a vendor sells you “AI optimization”, ask whether it is this file, and what else.
Talk Wednesday Here is the one thing to do this week: write your llms.txt. Download my template, fill in the blanks, and hand it to your web person, or paste it into your site builder's SEO settings yourself. Ten minutes. Then reply with your web address and I will read the file back to you the way a machine would. |
If you want the monthly check too, the playbook from Issue 13 has the five questions, the scorecard, and, if you use Claude, a skill that runs the whole thing for you.
See you next Wednesday.
P.S. The next 3-hour class is Tuesday 15 September, hands on keyboards, two blocks with a real break, $495. You leave with the first three of the six skills I teach, and the full price counts toward the four-week class if you book within 90 days. Reserve a seat.