How to get recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI assistants
· 6 min read
More people now ask an AI assistant “who’s a good tax accountant in Denver?” instead of searching. The assistant looks things up on the web and recommends the people it can find clear, consistent facts about. Here is how to be one of them.
How AI assistants find people
When you ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini or Copilot about a local professional, most of them search the web, read a handful of pages, and write an answer from what they found, often with links. They rely on search indexes such as Bing’s and Google’s, and on their own crawlers. So the basics of being found on search still apply, and a few things matter even more.
1. Let their crawlers in
Each assistant has its own crawler, such as GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot for OpenAI, ClaudeBot for Anthropic and PerplexityBot for Perplexity. Your site’s robots.txt file decides whether they may read your pages. Many website templates and firewalls block some of them by default, so check yours allows them.
2. State the facts plainly
Assistants quote sentences they can lift as they are. “Priya Shah is a chartered accountant in Leeds who does tax returns for freelancers and small companies” is easy to quote. “Passionate about numbers since forever” is not. Put your name, profession, place, specialties, prices and qualifications in plain sentences and lists.
3. Add structured data
Structured data (schema.org) is a hidden, machine-readable summary of the page: who you are, your job title, your address, your services and your opening hours. Search engines use it directly, and it removes guesswork for any system reading your page.
4. Be consistent everywhere
Assistants cross-check. If your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directory listings all give the same name, address, phone number and description of your work, the assistant can be confident they describe one real person. Contradictions make you look less reliable than someone whose details line up.
5. Be mentioned by others
Reviews on Google and trusted directories, articles, interviews and your professional body’s listing all count. Assistants weigh what others say about you, not just what you say about yourself.
6. Answer the questions people ask
A short FAQ with the questions clients actually ask (“Do you take new patients?”, “How much is a first consultation?”, “Do you work online?”) gives the assistant ready-made answers to match against the question it was asked.
7. Consider an llms.txt file
llms.txt is an emerging convention: a short plain-text summary of your site at yoursite/llms.txt, written for AI systems. Not every assistant reads it yet, but it costs nothing and gives any that do a clean, accurate summary.
8. Keep it fast and up to date
Pages that load quickly and are updated when things change are crawled more often, so new services, hours and prices reach the assistants sooner.
Every BeVisible page does the technical parts for you: its robots.txt welcomes the major AI crawlers, it has structured data, a sitemap entry and its own llms.txt, and search engines are told the moment you publish.