Can AI understand your business?

01

Imagine a customer asking a different kind of question

Someone asks an AI assistant:

1. “Find a local roofer who can repair a leaking flat roof and tell me how to request a quote.”
2. A meeting room for 20 people near a station, with prices and wheelchair access.
3. Compare software suppliers that support UK data hosting and provide an implementation service.

The assistant may search the web, read pages and bring back options. An AI agent may go further: open pages, compare details, fill in a booking enquiry or assemble a shopping basket, subject to the permissions and checks in that particular service. These are different capabilities; many customer journeys still end with a person contacting the business or approving a purchase.^[1,2,3]

The opportunity is straightforward. If the public information about your business is accurate, easy to find and easy to act on, both people and AI systems have a better chance of understanding it. There is no guaranteed way to make an AI assistant recommend you. The aim is to remove avoidable confusion and friction.

02

What “AI agent ready” means

Think of a new customer visiting your website for the first time. They need answers to five questions:

1. Who are you?Your real business name, location, contact details and relevant credentials.
2. What do you do or sell?Clear service or product descriptions, including who they are for.
3. Is it right for me?Price or pricing approach, coverage, availability, limitations and policies.
4. Can I trust this information?Current details, evidence, consistent claims and a clear source.
5. What can I do next?An obvious enquiry, booking, purchase or contact route that works.

An AI assistant has versions of the same questions. Some systems use search indexes, some fetch a page when asked, and browser agents may inspect a screenshot, page code or accessibility information to operate the site. There is no single switch that controls all of them.^[1,4,5,6]

03

Start with the information customers already need

Write one clear sentence near the top of your home page: “We help [who] with [what] in [where], and the next step is [action].” It need not follow that formula word for word. It should simply answer the question without vague language.

04

Make important information visible and consistent

If your best explanation lives only inside a picture, video, download, hover effect or private portal, some systems may miss it. Put essential facts in ordinary page text. Give important services or products their own findable pages, with sensible links from the rest of the site. Keep names, prices and policies consistent across those pages and your public business profiles. Google explicitly recommends crawlable pages, internal links, text for important content and current Business Profile or Merchant Center details for its AI search features.^[1,9]

This does not mean duplicating every sentence or generating hundreds of thin FAQ pages. Answer real customer questions where they naturally belong. If a price varies, say what determines it instead of making one up: “Every job is quoted after a survey; call-outs start at £X” only if that is true.

A useful comparison:

The second tells a customer and a machine much more.

05

Give people and agents a usable next step

Finding an answer is only part of the journey. If an assistant reaches your site, can it locate the right enquiry or booking route? Are buttons labelled with their actual action? Are form fields labelled, error messages clear, and steps stable on mobile?

These are accessibility and usability fundamentals. Browser agents can use page structure and the accessibility tree as well as screenshots. Google’s web.dev guidance recommends ordinary links and buttons, associated form labels, visible controls and stable layouts. Improving these things also helps people who use assistive technology.^[10]

For a small business, the right action may simply be “Request a quote” with a clear form. For an enterprise supplier, it may be “Request security information” or “Book a demo”, with the appropriate human review. You do not need to automate a transaction to be useful to an AI-assisted customer.

06

Check access and the facts behind the page

Ask your web team to check that public pages are accessible to search engines and that your hosting or security settings do not inadvertently block the services you want to reach. Different AI providers use different crawlers for search, user-requested access and model training. Those choices can be managed separately in some cases. For example, OpenAI distinguishes its search crawler from its training crawler, and Anthropic documents separate search, user and training bots. Decide deliberately rather than opening everything by default.^[4,5]

If your business has structured data, check that it describes what visitors actually see. Structured data is a set of labels in the page code that can clarify, for example, a product, organisation or business details. It can support eligible search features, but it is not a special pass into AI results. Google says no new AI-specific file or special schema is needed for its AI search features, and warns against overfocusing on markup.^[1,6]

Make your claims checkable. If you say “trusted by hundreds of businesses,” show a relevant case study, named customer where permission exists, credible review or clear explanation. A local tradesperson might show qualifications and examples of completed work; an enterprise supplier might publish security documentation, implementation details and customer evidence appropriate to its buyers. Only use proof you actually have.

For online shops, verify that product feeds and site pages agree on prices, availability, shipping and returns. A feed is a regularly updated catalogue supplied through a supported platform or channel. Shopify merchants already have a ChatGPT catalogue integration; direct OpenAI feeds have their own access route. A new feed is not automatically required for every business.^[2,7,8]

07

A quick self-check

Give each line a Yes, Partly or No. Choose one “No” you can fix this week.

1. 01A stranger can tell what we offer, who it is for and where we serve.Yes · Partly · No
2. 02Our key services or products have clear public pages.Yes · Partly · No
3. 03Pricing, or how to obtain a reliable price, is explained honestly.Yes · Partly · No
4. 04Hours, availability, delivery or service coverage are current where relevant.Yes · Partly · No
5. 05Policies and important conditions are easy to find.Yes · Partly · No
6. 06Our business details match across the website and main public listings.Yes · Partly · No
7. 07Our main pages can be found and read without signing in.Yes · Partly · No
8. 08Essential facts appear in page text that relevant crawlers can obtain, not only in a browser effect or image.Yes · Partly · No
9. 09Important claims have genuine supporting evidence that a visitor can inspect.Yes · Partly · No
10. 10Contact, quote, booking or purchase steps are clearly labelled and work.Yes · Partly · No
11. 11Product data or structured labels, where used, match the visible page.Yes · Partly · No
12. 12Someone owns the task of checking these facts when the business changes.Yes · Partly · No

This is a conversation starter, not an AI visibility score. Different industries and customer tasks need different evidence. A solicitor’s site, a plumbing firm and a large ecommerce catalogue should not be judged with an identical checklist.

08

What to do now, and what can wait

Start hereThis week

Correct the public facts, improve the first-screen explanation, make the main action obvious and test it on a phone.

NextThis month

Review service and product pages, business listings, indexing and crawler access; validate existing structured data or feeds if applicable; test a few realistic customer questions against public sources.

If warrantedLater

Consider more advanced product feeds, booking connections, agent-facing tools or transactional integrations. These standards and platform capabilities are evolving. Prioritise them when you can point to a real customer task and a supported route.^[1,7,10]

09

See what your website could do better today

Heading Studio’s free website audit reviews your current site and gives you practical findings on what could be clearer and more effective for visitors. The separate AI Agent Readiness check described in this guide is being developed and is not part of the current audit.

No website audit can guarantee that an AI assistant will mention or recommend a business. When Heading’s AI readiness assessment is available, its results will describe the public evidence checked and any limits on what could be verified.