A growing number of customers no longer type "plumber Reading" into a search box. They ask an assistant — ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, the summary at the top of a Google results page — and they get an answer rather than a list. That is a different thing to be visible in, and it is worth being precise about what is actually within your control, because a lot of what is currently sold as "AI SEO" is not.
Start with the honest part
Nobody can guarantee your business will be named in an AI answer. There is no submission form, no index to pay into, and no verified route in. Anyone selling guaranteed placement is either guessing or describing something that does not exist. What you can do is make your business legible enough that an assistant can use it — which is a real, finite piece of work with a clear specification.
What an assistant is actually doing
Broadly one of three things, and you cannot tell which from the outside. Some models answer from what they absorbed in training. Some search the web and read the pages that come back. Some do both. The practical consequence is the same in every case: what counts is text that can be read and quoted. Design, animation and layout are invisible to all of them.
The five things that decide it
- Your content must be in the HTML. If your text is assembled by JavaScript after the page loads, some readers will get an empty page. A server-rendered site — where the words are in the source — is the safe assumption, and it costs nothing to insist on.
- Answer questions plainly. "Passionate about quality since 2009" is not an answer to anything. "We install and repair gas boilers in Reading and Wokingham. Gas Safe registered, number 123456. Emergency call-outs until 10pm." is. Assistants quote sentences that answer a question; write some.
- Mark up who you are. Structured data — schema.org LocalBusiness with your trade, your services, your area, your hours — turns claims in prose into facts in a format built to be read. It is invisible to visitors and it removes all guesswork for a machine.
- Say the same thing everywhere. Name, address and phone number identical on your site, your Google profile, your Facebook page, your trade body listing. Contradictions make an assistant less confident, and a less confident model names someone else.
- Be corroborated. This is the one most people miss. A claim only on your own website is a claim. The same claim on your Google profile, in your reviews, on Companies House and on your trade register is a fact. Corroboration is what turns "this business says" into something a model will repeat.
Is this different from SEO?
It overlaps heavily. Both reward clear, well-structured, corroborated content, and a site that does well in search is usually a site an assistant can read. The difference is what winning looks like. Search returns ten results and the customer chooses; an assistant returns one answer naming two or three businesses. Ranking fourth on a page is a real position. Being the fourth business an assistant did not mention is not.
So the emphasis shifts: from being near the pages that answer the question, to being the page that answers it.
Where most trade websites fall down
On the first two. A site whose words are assembled by script after the page loads has nothing for a reader to quote, and a homepage that opens with a slogan rather than a plain statement of trade, area and credentials has nothing worth quoting. Both are invisible failures: the site looks entirely normal to you, because your browser runs the script and you already know what your business does.
The corroboration is the part with the clearest return, and it is not on your website at all. A complete Google Business Profile and a steady flow of genuine reviews are the strongest independent evidence a small business can have — and an assistant deciding whether to name you is weighing exactly that.
Every site we build is server-rendered with structured data, an FAQ in machine-readable form and a plain-text summary for AI crawlers — and we still will not promise you placement, because no one honestly can. What we ship is a site an assistant can read and describe correctly. See it on your own business: a free homepage rebuild, 48 hours, no obligation.