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Try something before you read on. Open ChatGPT in an incognito window and ask it to recommend a business in your category and city. Do the same in Gemini and Perplexity.
If three competitors come back and you don’t, that’s your problem. It usually isn’t because your website is bad. It’s that nobody has done the work to make it readable by the systems now sitting between you and your customer.
To optimize for AI search, make sure AI crawlers aren’t blocked in your robots.txt, put a direct 40 to 60 word answer under every question-shaped heading, add Organization, Article and FAQ Page schema, keep your business details identical everywhere they appear, build mentions on sites you don’t own, and track AI referrals as their own traffic segment.
That paragraph is also a demonstration. Direct answer first, specifics, no throat-clearing. That’s the format these systems lift.
This is the most common issue we find and the least interesting one. Plenty of sites quietly block AI crawlers because a developer added a rule during the 2023 scraping panic and nobody revisited it.
The crawlers do different jobs, so check each:
| Crawler | What it controls |
| GPTBot | OpenAI model training |
| OAI-SearchBot | ChatGPT’s search and citations |
| Google-Extended | Some non-Search Google AI uses |
| Googlebot | Google Search, AI Overviews and AI Mode |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity’s index |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic’s crawler |
Blocking GPTBot while allowing OAI-SearchBot is a reasonable choice if you don’t want your content training models but do want to appear in ChatGPT answers. Blocking everything by accident is not.
Also: ChatGPT leans on Bing’s index for part of its web results. If you’ve never opened Bing Webmaster Tools, open it.
Most business websites bury the answer under three paragraphs of context and a bit of company history.
Flip it. Write headings the way a customer would say the question out loud, then answer in the first 40 to 60 words underneath. Explain afterwards for readers who want depth.
You don’t need to chop content into artificial chunks. Google confirmed in June 2026 that its systems can understand multiple topics on one page and surface the relevant part themselves. Write for someone in a hurry and the machine-readable structure follows.
Language models extract from tables, numbered steps and short paragraphs far more reliably than from dense prose. A comparison table beats three paragraphs describing the same three things. One idea per paragraph.
Specificity matters more than people expect. “We’ve handled campaigns for hundreds of clients” is unquotable. “300+ clients across Maharashtra and Jharkhand since 2017” is a fact a model can repeat with your name attached. Date your claims and update them.
Add Organization schema with your real business details, Article schema on blog content, FAQPage where you’re answering questions, and LocalBusiness with proper address markup if you serve a city.
Then the boring part that matters just as much: make sure your business name, address and phone number are byte-for-byte identical on your website, Google Business Profile, Justdial, IndiaMART, LinkedIn and every directory you’re listed on. Models build a picture of your business from all of these. Contradictions make them less confident about recommending you.
This is where the work departs hardest from classic SEO. Models weigh what other people say about you, not only what you say about yourself: review volume, industry directories, third-party roundups, Reddit threads, YouTube, news mentions.
You can’t schema-markup your way into being recommended. If nobody outside your domain mentions your brand, you’re relying entirely on your own site to make the case.
Check server logs for hits from GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot to confirm you’re being crawled at all. Segment referrals from chatgpt.com, gemini.google.com and perplexity.ai separately in GA4. Watch Search Console for AI Overview appearances. Then run the prompt test from the top of this article monthly, incognito, across several phrasings.
A lot of advice right now tells you to publish an llms.txt file. Our view: for most businesses it’s a low priority.
Google’s May 2026 AI optimization guidance says llms.txt isn’t needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Ahrefs studied around 38,000 domains carrying the file and found 97% got zero requests for it in May 2026. It takes half an hour and costs nothing, so publish one if you want. Just don’t let it stand in for the six steps above.
We’ve spent nine years building this into client sites, across 300+ clients, 200+ websites and over 12 lakh leads generated. We’re a certified Google and Meta Partner agency working out of Wakad in Pune and Lalpur in Ranchi.
What usually matters most is that our developers, SEO team, content writers and branding strategists sit under one roof. Steps 1 and 4 are developer work. Steps 2 and 3 are content work. Step 5 is brand work. Most businesses have those split across three vendors who never speak to each other, which is why the work stalls. One client account saw organic impressions rise 126% once all of it pulled the same way.
We also won’t oversell it. AI referral volume is still small next to Google for most Indian businesses. But it converts unusually well, it’s growing fast, and it’s cheap to optimize for AI search now rather than after your competitors have.
We’ll audit your crawler access, schema, content structure and off-site brand signals, then show you what’s stopping ChatGPT and Gemini from citing you.
Call +91 808 083 6251 or email [email protected]. We’ll run the test from the top of this page on your business and tell you what comes back.
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