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Being found: Google, Business Profiles and AI assistants

Search engines and AI assistants can only cite a page they are allowed to fetch and able to read.

Google, Bing, ChatGPT and Perplexity each send their own crawlers, each publishes its own rules for them, and a website's robots.txt decides which of them may read it. These articles go through those rules from the companies' own documentation.

None of it guarantees a ranking or a mention in an AI answer, and nothing here claims it does. What a business controls is whether its pages can be fetched, whether they say plainly what it does and where, and whether its listings agree with its website.

Free checkAI crawler access checkReads your robots.txt and tells you which search and AI crawlers may fetch your homepage, and whether you publish a sitemap and an llms.txt.

5 articles on this

Start here · Search and AI
How Google's AI features, ChatGPT and other assistants find and cite a business
Every AI assistant that cites websites reads them with a crawler, and every company that runs one publishes rules for it. None of them promises to cite anybody. What their own pages say a business can do is short, and most of it is ordinary good practice.4 minute read · 8 sources
Search and AI
A Google Business Profile for a business with no shopfront
A business that goes to its customers can still have a Google Business Profile. Google's rules say to leave the address off, list the areas you serve, and use the name on your door.2 minute read · 3 sources
Search and AI
Why is my website not showing on Google? Six checks, in order
A page missing from Google is usually missing for a reason you can see from outside, and Google's own tools say which. Work through these in order and stop at the first one that explains it.3 minute read · 5 sources
Search and AI
AI crawlers and robots.txt: what to allow, what to block, and how it is read
Blocking AI crawlers is one line per crawler in robots.txt. The care is in choosing which: the same company runs a crawler for its search and a separate one for training, and blocking the wrong one takes you out of answers you wanted to be in.3 minute read · 8 sources
Search and AI
llms.txt: what it is, who says they read it, and whether to bother
llms.txt is a short Markdown file at the root of a website that points AI agents at the pages worth reading. It is a proposal, not a standard, and no search engine or AI company has said it uses one to decide what to cite.3 minute read · 3 sources

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Being found: Google, Business Profiles and AI assistants

5 articles on this

How Google's AI features, ChatGPT and other assistants find and cite a business

A Google Business Profile for a business with no shopfront

Why is my website not showing on Google? Six checks, in order

AI crawlers and robots.txt: what to allow, what to block, and how it is read

llms.txt: what it is, who says they read it, and whether to bother

What we do about this

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