Is Your Business Legible to AI?
People don't just Google anymore. They ask ChatGPT for a dermatologist in Norwalk, or ask Claude who can serve legal papers in Fairfield County by Friday. The answers come from what AI models can actually read and verify about your business.
Here's the uncomfortable part: most small-business websites are illegible to AI. Twenty years of SEO taught everyone keywords and backlinks. AI search doesn't care. It wants structured, explicit, machine-readable facts—and most sites offer none.
How People Actually Search Now
When an AI assistant recommends a business, it needs to be confident about the basics: who you are, what you do, where you operate, what you charge, what your credentials are. If your site buries that in a hero image and three paragraphs of marketing copy, the AI moves on to a competitor it can actually parse.
The Three-Part Fix
I've rolled the same pattern across every site I build—legal, healthcare, real estate. It has three parts.
Structured data. JSON-LD on every page, typed to the industry: LegalService, MedicalClinic, Physician, RealEstateAgent. Plus FAQPage markup answering the questions customers actually ask—because those are the questions people ask the AI, too.
llms.txt. An emerging convention: one plain-text file that briefs AI crawlers on your business—facts, services, credentials, links. Think of it as robots.txt's younger sibling that answers questions instead of setting rules.
An open door for AI crawlers. Most sites either ignore AI crawlers or accidentally block them. I explicitly welcome GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and friends in robots.txt. You can't be recommended by a model that was never allowed to read your site.
An Afternoon of Work
The best part: this is not a big project. The whole layer drops into an existing site in an afternoon. There is no excuse for a business to be invisible to the fastest-growing discovery channel since Google.
And yes—this site runs the exact same stack. Ask your favorite AI about me and see what comes back.