10 Things Your Business Isn't Doing for AI Search

Google holds about 90% of the search market, according to StatCounter. So it makes sense that almost every business has a Google Business Profile. Ask the same business about their Bing listing, and you'll usually get a blank stare.

That blind spot matters more than it used to. Bing powers Microsoft Copilot, which is now built into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It also feeds DuckDuckGo and Yahoo, and it's one of the sources ChatGPT pulls from when it searches the web. When your buyers ask an AI tool who to hire, the answer is coming from places most businesses have never looked.

We wrote about why this shift matters in AI-Era Marketing: When You Aren't Getting Clicks. This post is the practical follow-up. None of it requires a content team or a big budget. Most of it takes an afternoon.

You can get these 5 listings right now

1. Bing Webmaster Tools and Bing Places

These are two different things, and you want both.

Bing Webmaster Tools tells Bing your website exists and how to crawl it. If you already use Google Search Console, you can import your site in a few clicks.

Bing Places is Bing's version of Google Business Profile. It's where your address, hours, phone number, and services live. You can import this from Google too, so it's extra easy.

2. Apple Business Connect

This is Apple's version of a business profile, and almost nobody has claimed theirs. It controls how you appear in Apple Maps, in Siri, and in Apple's AI features. Every iPhone user who asks Siri for a recommendation is drawing on this data. It's free and takes about 20 minutes. But note, it might not let you create an account if you don't have a US phone number.

3. G2

G2 is one of the review sites AI tools lean on most when someone asks for "the best X for Y." If you sell software, you need to be there. If you sell services, G2 has service categories too.

Claim your profile, fill out every field, and ask your trusted clients to leave a review. The G2 review process can be annoying, so make sure you're asking a customer who will be willing to spend some time talking about you. An empty profile won't do much, but a complete one with a handful of real reviews gives AI tools something to cite.

4. Reddit, if it fits your business

AI tools cite Reddit constantly. A company subreddit gives your users a place to talk to each other, ask questions, and help each other out. It also gives you something less obvious: an early warning system.

We had a client with a very unique name who was a partner of a huge software company. One day, someone posted in that software company's subreddit about a really negative experience with our client. We had marked the software's subreddit as a favorite to make sure we would see any relevant posts - and it worked! Because we caught it early, we were able to let the client know right away. They reached out, it turned out to be a misunderstanding, and once it was cleared up the redditor, who was a lead, took the post down.

Think about what happens if nobody sees that post for six months. It sits there, collects comments, and becomes one of the things an AI tool finds when someone asks about your company. You don't want a misunderstanding to become your AI summary.

5. A press release

A press release sent through a wire service gets syndicated to dozens of news sites at once. SEOs used to do this for the backlinks, but they have a minimal impact on your site's DR unless it's linked to by someone big like the Wall Street Journal. Today, the point isn't the backlinks, it's that AI tools now have credible third-party sources confirming who you are and what you do.

Make sure you are actually promoting something worthwhile. It can be an important new hire or a new version of your software with important updates. If it's important enough to post on your website, it's good enough to be a press release.

Here are 4 technical fixes that are worth working with a developer on

If you manage your website yourself you may be able to do them, but it's worth working with a professional to make sure your site isn't preventing AI from finding your business.

6. Make sure you're not blocking AI crawlers

AI tools send crawlers to read your site, with names like GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and ClaudeBot. If your site blocks them, you're invisible to those tools no matter how good your content is.

This happens by accident more than you'd think. Blocking bots was a common thing to do to prevent false traffic visits. And Cloudflare, which a huge number of websites run on, started blocking AI crawlers by default for new sites in 2025. If you set up Cloudflare and never touched that setting, check it and check your robots.txt to see what you allow and what you block.

7. Check whether your site is invisible without JavaScript

We first learned about this issue when we asked an AI about the site of one of our clients, and it said it couldn't see anything on the site.

A lot of modern websites load their text using JavaScript after the page opens. That's fine for people, because your browser runs the JavaScript and shows the page. But many AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. They see the page before anything loads, which can mean they see almost nothing.

Try it yourself - ask AI what it can see about your site. Ask specific questions about content on different pages to get a good sense of what is and isn't visible.

8. Add schema markup

Schema is code that tells search engines and AI tools exactly what your business is. The most useful piece is Organization schema with "sameAs" links pointing to your LinkedIn page, G2 profile, Crunchbase, and anywhere else you're listed.

Why does that matter? It tells AI tools that all those profiles belong to one business. Without it, they're left guessing whether the KSW on LinkedIn is the same KSW on G2.

9. Turn on IndexNow and add an llms.txt file

IndexNow is a free system that tells Bing and other search engines the moment you publish or update a page, instead of waiting for them to notice. Many website platforms support it as a plugin.

An llms.txt file is a plain text summary of your site written for AI tools. When doing research for this blog post, Claude told us that none of the major AI companies have confirmed they actually read it. But we have experience from trying to solve our javascript blindness that some AIs do actually read it.

Start and end with this

10. Ask the AI about yourself, then track what it sends you

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot. Ask each one two questions:

• "What does [your company] do?"
• "Who are the best [your category] for [your type of customer]?"

Ask in a brand-new chat, not inside a project or workspace where you've already shared information about your business. Otherwise, the AI will answer from what you've told it, not from what it finds online.

Create a document to log what each AI tells you. Is the information wrong or just incomplete? Are you missing entirely? Is a competitor showing up instead? That tells you which of the nine items above to start with.

Then set up a segment in Google Analytics for traffic coming from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, and copilot.microsoft.com. It won't be a big number at first. But it's the only way to know if any of this is working. Not sure how to do it? Ask your AI.

Most of this list costs nothing but an afternoon

You don't need to rebuild your website or hire an agency to start showing up in AI search. Claim the listings, have your developer check the technical pieces, and ask the AI tools what they think of you.

The businesses doing this now are the ones AI tools will recommend later.

Want help figuring out how your business shows up in AI search, and what to fix first? Let's talk.