BUYER’S GUIDE
What Gets a Business Named in AI Answers, and How to Check What You’re Sold
UPDATED OCTOBER 2, 2026 · EVERY SOURCE LINKED
Chances are someone has already offered to get your business into ChatGPT’s answers. Some of what they sell is real work, and some of it is work the AI companies say in writing you don’t need. Let’s walk through both, sources included, so you can size up any pitch you get, including ours.
What the engines read
Let’s start with the good news. When ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude names a business, it is quoting passages it found on ordinary web pages: your site and the other sites that write about you, the same pages your customers can read. Each engine sends out a crawler, a program that reads web pages one after another the way a mail carrier walks a route, and what the crawler brings back is your site as it stands. Think of the AI as a fast reader with a short memory. It grabs the clearest sentence it can find about what you do and where, repeats it, and moves on.
Google’s map-style answers work a little differently. When Google’s AI shows local businesses as cards, with a name, a rating and a Call button, it is reading your Google Business Profile, the listing that holds your hours, your category and your reviews. So there are two places to get right: the page people read and the profile Google reads. Both are already in your hands.
What you may be told
Here are eight things owners tell us they’ve been pitched. Under each one is what the engine companies say in their own words, and what that means for you. Let’s take them one at a time.
“You need a JSON or markdown version of your site so the AI can read it.”
“You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features.”
What it means for you: No, you don’t. JSON is a format for handing facts to software (picture a filing cabinet with every drawer labelled), markdown is plain text with simple headings, and some AI tools do convert your page into markdown-like text after they fetch it, which is why clear headings, short paragraphs, lists and tables on the page itself are what carry through. Cloudflare began doing something close to that in February 2026 for sites on its Pro, Business and Enterprise plans, handing a tool the same page as markdown when the tool asks for it, and that is harmless because it is the same content in another format. None of the AI search engines says it reads a separate markdown or JSON copy of a site, so pay for a clearer page before you pay for a copy of one.
“We show the AI crawlers a special optimized version of your pages.”
“Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content to users and search engines with the intent to manipulate search rankings and mislead users.”
What it means for you: Say no to this one. Googlebot, Google’s crawler, is the one that feeds Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, so showing it a different page from the one people see is exactly what Google’s spam policy describes. It also means the claims the AI repeats about you are claims your own customers can’t find on your site. The honest version of this work is simple: make the page your customers read clearer, and every crawler gets the better page too.
“You need an llms.txt file or the AI won’t find you.”
“You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features.”
What it means for you: You can skip it, and if you add one, expect nothing from it. An llms.txt file is a plain text note left at your site’s front door for AI tools to read, and Google’s line above covers it: you don’t need AI text files to appear. We publish one on our own site because it costs nothing, and we label it, in the file itself, as having no demonstrated effect on being cited. If someone charges you for one, you now know what it’s worth.
“Special schema markup is how you get picked.”
“There’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add.”
What it means for you: There is no secret markup, and the ordinary kind is still worth doing. Structured data is a small block inside your normal web page that labels facts already on it, like the tags on moving boxes: name, address, services. Google says it has to match what’s visible on the page, and when it does, it’s useful; we build it for customers and our own site carries it. Anything sold to you as “special” is either the ordinary kind at a higher price, or labels for facts that aren’t on your page, and that second one breaks Google’s own rule that the markup match the page.
“We guarantee you the #1 spot in ChatGPT within 90 days.” Nobody can.
“No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”
What it means for you: Nobody can promise where an AI answer will put you, and nobody can promise a date. The engines disagree with each other, the same question can come back different on a different day, and Google says so in writing. What a good vendor can promise is work: what they will change, where, and by when, with a measurement before and after so you can see what moved. Hold anyone, including us, to that.
“Here’s your AI visibility score, out of 100.”
63 questions were answered by all seven engines, the business was named by at least one engine on 25 of them, and by all seven on none. Claude’s answers in that pass were cut off part way, so its count is a floor. The other six engines all named the business on 1 of the 63.
What it means for you: One number hides the thing you need to fix. The seven engines don’t compare notes, so a single score averages a yes on one engine with a no on six others and tells you nothing about which six, or why. Google’s map answers read your profile and ChatGPT reads your pages, so a weak profile and a weak page are two different jobs, and one number can’t tell you which one you have. Ask for the result per engine, with how many questions each one was asked, and if the vendor can show you that, the single score was only a summary.
“We’ll submit your site to ChatGPT and the other engines for you.”
“OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features.”
“Keep in mind that submitting a sitemap is merely a hint: it doesn’t guarantee that Google will download the sitemap or use the sitemap for crawling URLs on the site.”
“Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google.”
What it means for you: There is no submission form for ChatGPT’s answers. ChatGPT finds a site through a crawler called OAI-SearchBot, Google’s AI answers run on Googlebot, the same crawler that already reads your site for regular search, and the thing worth checking is that neither is blocked by your site’s settings (our free Readability check tests it, as does any tool that reads your robots.txt, the small file that tells crawlers what they may read). What you can submit, free, is a sitemap, a list of your pages, through Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. It takes minutes, you can do it yourself, and Google calls even that a hint. Nobody needs to be paid for it, and a priority submit doesn’t exist, which is why Google wrote the line quoted above.
“We’ll get you into ChatGPT’s answers.”
“Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you.”
“Ads will be clearly labeled and separated from the organic answer.”
“Ads are eligible to be shown above, below or within AI Overviews on Search, allowing advertisers to reach customers in new moments of exploration on Search.”
What it means for you: Ask which of two things is for sale, because there are now two ways to show up: inside the answer, or as an ad beside it. Ads now run in ChatGPT and in Google’s AI Overviews, and OpenAI says an ad is labelled and sits apart from the organic answer (organic meaning the unpaid one), so a sponsored placement can be a perfectly sound marketing decision, priced and judged like any other ad. Being named inside the answer is a different thing, and by OpenAI’s own words an ad doesn’t buy it. Advertising is fine. A pitch that sells an ad in the language of being named is the problem, so have the vendor say plainly which one you’re paying for.
Questions to ask anyone you hire, including us
Take these into any meeting. A good vendor will welcome them, because every question here has a plain answer. Let’s make it easy to compare: our answers sit under each one so you can hold us to the same standard.
- Which AI engines do you measure, and how exactly do you ask them?
- Our answer: Seven. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Grok through their official APIs with web search on (an API is the door a company opens so software can ask its AI a question directly), and Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode through a search-results service. Every answer is labelled with how it was measured, and we say plainly that an API answer stands in for the consumer app and can answer differently.
- How many times do you ask each question?
- Our answer: Three passes. The $149 baseline asks about 100 questions across 7 engines, 3 times each, which is 2,100 runs, and you review the question list before we run it.
- Do you lock a starting point before anything on my site changes?
- Our answer: Yes. The baseline is locked before anything changes, so every later result compares against the same record. Without that, nobody can tell you what the work did.
- Will you show me each engine separately, with how many questions it was asked?
- Our answer: Yes. Every engine gets its own column and its own denominator, and we never publish one blended score. We also report whether a mention was a clickable link, because being named and being linked are two different things.
- Do the AI crawlers see the same page my customers see?
- Our answer: Always. We change the page your customers read, and the crawlers get that same page. We never show a crawler a different version.
- What exactly gets done, in whose accounts, and what stays if I stop?
- Our answer: On the $199 monthly plan the AI writes the work (Business Profile text, review requests and the like) from your own site, and you paste it in yourself, with no logins handed over. On Done For You, $2,500 to start and then $1,995 a month, we apply it inside your accounts after you approve each piece. Either way it lives in your own accounts and nothing runs from our servers, so it all stays if you stop.
- Do you promise a ranking or a date?
- Our answer: No. We promise the work and the measurement. Nobody can promise where an AI will put you tomorrow.
Whoever you hire
Whoever you end up hiring, you now have the sources and the questions, and that’s what this page is for. If you’d like a free look first, our one-question check asks all seven engines about your business and shows you what each one said. If you want the full picture, the $149 baseline runs about 100 questions three times and locks the record, and it credits in full against your first month if you subscribe within 30 days of delivery. Good luck out there.
TONY EGGLESTON · FOUNDER, NAMEDFIRST · AIGENT, LLC
ABOUT TONY ·
HELLO@COMMANDMODULE.COM