More and more people skip Google and ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini "what's the best tool for X?". AI gives 3 to 5 names. If it can't read your site, it fills those spots with your competitors.
I spent the last months digging into why AI names some products and not others. Most of the reasons are boring, fixable things on your own website. Here's the checklist, with a quick way to test each one.
Part 1: Can AI read you?
1. Let AI crawlers in. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. Make sure you don't block GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot. Then check your CDN: Cloudflare has a setting that blocks AI bots, and some plans turn it on by default.
2. Serve real HTML. Test: open your homepage with JavaScript turned off (or curl yoursite.com). If the page is empty or says "loading", most AI crawlers see the same thing. They usually don't run JavaScript. Use server-side rendering or static pages for anything important.
3. Be in Bing, not just Google. Some AI search tools lean on Bing's index. Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. Takes 5 minutes.
Part 2: Does AI understand you?
4. Say what you are in one line. "X is a [category] for [who]." On your homepage, in plain text, near the top. Clever taglines like "Work, reimagined" tell AI nothing.
5. Show pricing as text. Not an image, not "contact sales" only. "Cheap" and "free tier" questions are common, and AI can't answer them about you if it can't read your price.
6. Add structured data. Organization, SoftwareApplication (or Product) and FAQ schema. Test with Google's Rich Results Test.
7. Answer the questions your customers ask AI. Write the pages people search for: "X vs Y", "best tools for [job]", "alternatives to [big competitor]". Be honest in them; AI quotes pages that read like real comparisons, not ads.
Part 3: Does AI trust you?
8. Keep your facts the same everywhere. Your site, G2, Capterra, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Product Hunt. Same name, same category, same price. If they disagree, AI gets unsure and picks someone else.
9. Get on the lists AI cites. Ask Perplexity a question in your category and look at the sources. They're mostly "Top 10 tools for…" articles. Those are your targets: email the authors and ask to be added. Short, polite, with one real reason you fit.
10. Ask AI about yourself every week. Write down 10 to 20 questions your customers would ask. Ask them in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini every week. Track who gets named. It changes more often than you'd think.
Quick 1-minute test: ask ChatGPT "What does yoursite.com do?". If the answer is vague or wrong, start with points 1, 2 and 4.
Which of these have you already done? Curious what's worked for others, especially on getting into those "best tools" lists.
