How to Get Your Business Found on Google and in AI Answers

Some people now ask an AI assistant where they used to type a search. For a business the question is the same either way: when someone asks for what you do, does your name come up, and is the description right?

The work for both overlaps almost entirely. Assistants that search the web before they answer read the same pages a search engine indexes, so they depend on the same two things: a website that says clearly what the business is, and other sites that confirm it.

What your own site says

A crawler cannot ask you questions. It has your homepage and whatever that page links to, and these are the parts it reads first:

• The page title. Put your brand name and what you do in it: "Acme Bakery | Sourdough and Pastries in Portland" tells a reader far more than "Home".
• The meta description, one or two sentences of up to about 160 characters. Without one, search engines and assistants write their own summary from whatever text they find on the page.
• One main heading (the H1) that says what the business does, rather than "Welcome".
• Structured data. An Organization block in JSON-LD states your name, logo, website and social profiles in a form software can read directly. Google publishes documentation on adding it, and many website builders and SEO plugins can add it for you.
• A sitemap, and nothing that blocks search engines. Check that neither robots.txt nor a noindex tag on the page tells them to stay away. Both are easy to leave behind after a redesign.
• Links from your site to your profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and elsewhere, which help tie those profiles to the same business.

You can check all of these at once with our free website authority check. It reads your homepage, robots.txt, sitemap and domain record, scores what it finds, and lists the fixes first.

What other sites say

Your own site can only describe you. Independent sites carry more weight because they are harder to fake, and three kinds of reference help most.

The first is consistent profiles: your details on map listings, social networks and directories in your field, matching your website exactly. Our post on free business listing sites worth your time covers which ones to set up.

The second is relevant links. A link from a business that shares your customers without competing with you is a natural signal, like a bakery linking to the roaster that supplies its coffee. Brand Share's partner finder looks for businesses that share your topics and are not competitors, and you can invite them to swap links.

The third is mentions in context: an article, a review or a local news story that describes what you do. A mention without a link counts for less, but it still adds to the picture of a real business that people know about.

What does not help

Repeating a phrase over and over in your title or description makes it harder to read for people and software alike. Bought links mostly sit on sites built to sell them, and Google's spam policies treat buying links to influence rankings as link spam. Dozens of thin pages aimed at small variations of one phrase tend to be filtered out of search, and an assistant finds nothing in them worth quoting.

Where to start

1. Fix the basics on your homepage: title, description, heading, structured data and sitemap.
2. Claim and complete the main profiles, with identical details on every one.
3. List your brand on one or two directories that give you a real page and a direct link. A Brand Share listing is free.
4. Build a handful of real partnerships with complementary businesses, one at a time.

None of this works overnight. Search engines recrawl on their own schedule, and assistants can only use what has been indexed. Each step keeps working after you finish it, though, and none of them needs a budget.