Visibility
Being read by AI, with no promise.
Some customers now ask an AI assistant rather than a search engine. What we actually know about how these tools read a website, and what nobody can guarantee.
What Google says
For its AI generated answers (AI Overviews and AI Mode), Google writes that there are no additional requirements and no special optimisations. The page must be indexed and eligible to appear in regular search. No special structured data is needed, and no special file for AI either.
What OpenAI says
For ChatGPT search, OpenAI uses a crawler called OAI-SearchBot. A site that blocks it is not shown in ChatGPT search answers. OpenAI promises no citation to the sites that allow it.
The llms.txt file
Many people talk about it. In June 2025, Google’s John Mueller wrote that no AI system was using this file, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable. Our sites publish one because it costs little, but we never present it as a lever.
What a study measured
BrightLocal, which sells tracking tools, published on 16 September 2026 a study of about 200,000 local searches on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews. Business websites are the most cited sources, ahead of Google profiles.
The same study shows that when the same question is asked twice, the lists of businesses overlap by only 21 to 33 percent depending on the tool. It is a vendor’s study, to be read as a trend, but it says one clear thing: an AI’s answer changes from one time to the next.
What we do, in practice
- The important facts written as text: services, prices, hours, address, phone.
- The same name, address and number everywhere.
- Short answers to your customers’ real questions, on the page.
- A fast site that the crawlers of Google, Bing and OpenAI can read.
- Structured data that says exactly what the page shows.
And we promise neither a ranking nor a citation: no engine, neither Google nor an AI assistant, guarantees them. We prepare your site to be read and understood. The rest is up to them.
