Getting named by the AI answers

The AI engines read your normal web pages

Google says this plainly in its own guidance. The page "AI features and your website," last updated December 10, 2025, states that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations are necessary. The same page says you do not need to create new machine readable files or extra markup to show up in those features.

So a page that loads fast and names your trade, your town and your phone number in plain text is doing the real job. Google lists a good page experience among the fundamentals. Nobody has shown that speed on its own puts you in an AI answer, so treat it as table stakes rather than a lever.

Make sure you are not blocking the readers

This is where small sites lose most often. One line in a robots.txt file, added years ago by a developer who has moved on, can keep you out of an answer engine entirely.

OpenAI's crawler documentation lists its readers separately. OAI-SearchBot is the one that surfaces sites inside ChatGPT's search features, and the page says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot is the training reader. That page carries no update date. It also says it can take about 24 hours after a robots.txt change for their systems to adjust, which is a number you can test yourself: change the file, wait a day, look again.

Google splits its controls the same way. Google's crawler documentation, last updated July 14, 2026, says Google-Extended does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search and is not used as a ranking signal there. Blocking Google-Extended is a decision about Gemini training and grounding. It is not a decision about Search.

What you can measure, and what you cannot

Google Search Console now carries a generative AI performance report. It shows impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode. It does not show clicks, click rates, or the questions people typed. Google also says not all properties have access yet, as the report is rolling out over time. That help page carries no update date.

That gap matters. Anyone selling you an "AI visibility score" is working from partial data too. No one can promise you a mention in an AI answer, and no one can sell you a switch that puts you in one. If a vendor guarantees a spot, that is the moment to walk away.

What to do next

Work through these in order. Each one is free and takes minutes.

• Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser and read every Disallow line out loud.
• Check whether OAI-SearchBot or GPTBot is blocked there, and decide on purpose instead of by accident.
• Run your three most important pages through Google's PageSpeed test and fix what it flags.
• Put your service, your service area, your hours and your phone number in real text, not inside an image.
• Add the site to Google Search Console and look for the generative AI report.

If all five are already done, you are in good shape and you do not need to buy anything else this month. Check again after any site redesign, since a new build can reintroduce an old block.