10 Website Changes That Help AI Describe You

The website changes that help an AI assistant describe your business correctly are mostly plain writing: say what you do, for whom and where in real text, give each service its own page, and keep hours, prices and answers on the page instead of inside images or PDFs. Each of the ten takes about 15 minutes to check.

This checklist is one part of the complete AEO guide. It skips the three technical jobs that already have their own posts (covered at the end) and sticks to what a visitor reads. A customer and an assistant start from the same text.

Nothing here is a trick. Google's guide to AI features in Search says no additional requirements or special optimizations are needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that ordinary SEO best practices apply. Nobody can guarantee an assistant will name you because of these edits, but it cannot repeat a fact your site never states.

1. Open your homepage with one sentence: what you do, for whom, where

Many homepages open with a slogan like "Quality you can trust" that names no service and no place. Put one plain sentence at the top that a stranger could repeat to a friend.

To check, cover the logo and read only the first screen. Can you tell the trade, the customers and the city? Say a family-run tire shop in Weslaco opens with "Tire sales, repairs and same-day flat fixes for drivers in Weslaco, Mercedes and Donna." Make sure it is typed text, not part of a banner image.

2. Give each service its own page, in plain language

One page listing twelve services answers no single question well. A page per service lets you say what the job is, who needs it, what affects the price and how to book.

Say a pest control company in Harlingen has one "Services" page. Splitting out ant control, termite inspections and rodent removal gives each question somewhere to land. Writing those pages so they can be quoted is covered in how to write an article that AI will cite.

3. Write real text for each town you serve

A footer that lists twenty cities says little. A short page for a town where you really work says more: the services you offer there, the days your crew is in the area, anything particular to the job.

Pick your farthest town and search your site for it. If the only match is the footer, there is a gap. Say a landscaping company in Edinburg also mows in Pharr and San Juan. It writes a few honest paragraphs for each, in different words. Add only towns you truly serve.

4. Put hours, phone and address in text, and test every way to reach you

"Open Sunday?" is a common question. If your hours sit inside a photo of a sign, a program reading the page may see only a picture. Type them in, with your phone and address, and match your Google Business Profile exactly (the Google Business Profile checklist shows what to match).

Try to highlight your hours with your mouse. If you cannot, they are an image. Then test your contact options like a customer:

• Call the number from a second phone.
• Tap the number on a mobile screen to confirm it dials.
• Submit the contact form and confirm the message lands in an inbox someone reads.
• Click the email link and check it opens a message to the right address.

5. Add a FAQ that answers what customers really ask

Pull questions from your inbox, call notes and front desk, not from a template. Make each a heading worded the way a customer says it, and answer in the first sentence. "Do you come to my house or workplace?" beats "Our Commitment to Convenience." The 10 questions your customers ask AI lists the kinds to cover.

Write down five questions you answered by phone this week. If your site does not answer them, add a two to four sentence reply to each.

6. State prices, or a starting range, where you can stand behind it

"Call for a quote" gives an assistant nothing to repeat when someone asks what a job costs, so it may fall back on figures from elsewhere. You do not need a full price list. A starting price, a typical range or a plain note on what moves the price all help.

Publish only numbers you will honor, say what is included, and add the date you reviewed them. Say a car detailing shop in McAllen lists its real starting price by vehicle size and adds that heavy stains are quoted after seeing the car.

7. Free the text trapped in images and PDFs, and describe your photos

Menus, price lists and accepted-insurance lists often live in a PDF or a photo. Retype them as page text and keep the PDF as an optional download. Google's advice is to make sure important content is available in textual form.

Then check your photos. Google's image guidance recommends useful, information-rich alt text (a short written description of the picture), such as "Dalmatian puppy playing fetch" rather than "puppy," plus descriptive file names over IMG00023.JPG. Say a taquería in Edinburg turns its menu PDF into a page of dishes and prices and labels a photo "Plate of enchiladas verdes with rice and beans."

8. Say who is behind the business on your About page

When someone asks whether a company is reliable, an assistant looks for facts about who you are. Google's helpful-content guidance asks whether it is self-evident to visitors who created the content, and warns that fabricated creator profiles are deception. So tell the truth plainly.

In about five sentences, give the year you opened, the towns you serve, what you specialize in, and any license or insurance you actually hold. Name the owner if they are comfortable with it, and use real photos.

9. Show a "last updated" date on pages that change

Hours, holiday schedules, prices and specials go stale, and an old page that contradicts your profile muddies which version is true. Google's guidance on dates is to show a user-visible date, prominently, labeled with words like "Last updated."

Change it only when something really changed. Scan your hours, pricing and specials pages for anything old. Say an event venue in Mission still shows last year's holiday hours: fix them and delete expired promotions.

10. Make the site fast and complete on a phone

Google says it uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking, so the phone page needs the same main content as the desktop one. An accordion is fine; missing text is not. Google also says its ranking systems use Core Web Vitals: loading (Largest Contentful Paint, within 2.5 seconds), responsiveness (Interaction to Next Paint, under 200 milliseconds) and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift, under 0.1).

Good scores do not guarantee a top position, Google adds, and relevance comes first. So treat speed as a courtesy. Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights, which Google lists among tools that measure all three, then open the site on your phone over mobile data and see whether you can find your hours within ten seconds. An oversized photo is a common cause of a slow page, and shrinking it is often the quickest fix.

Where do you start, and what about the technical files?

Start with items 1, 4 and 5, the fastest ones. The three technical jobs are separate: the robots.txt guide shows whether you block crawlers, schema markup for local businesses covers labeling facts for machines, and llms.txt explained covers the summary file.

To see whether your edits change the answer, run the free check at /scan. The Growrank dashboard repeats it weekly across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity for $39 a month, first 7 days free, card required, cancel anytime. See the plan.

Frequently asked questions