More buyers now ask an assistant for a recommendation before they ever reach a search box. An answer about your business is already being given, several times a day, with or without your involvement. You may as well know what it says.
Thirty seconds, no email
Three things to watch for in what comes back: details that are wrong, a competitor named where you should be, and the polite admission that it has never heard of you. Any of the three is worth fixing.
Add a name, then pick one
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Perplexity
- Grok
Nothing is sent to us. The name you type is used to build the four links and goes no further.
What gets looked at
An assistant builds its answer from what it can reach, read and verify. Almost every bad answer traces back to one of these, and most of them are a morning’s work rather than a project.
Whether they are allowed in
Every assistant sends its own crawler, and plenty of sites turn them away without meaning to. One line in the wrong file is enough to make a business invisible to ChatGPT while it still ranks perfectly well on Google.
Whether the page works without JavaScript
Most of these crawlers do not run scripts. If your headline, your prices or your opening hours only appear once the page has finished loading, there is a good chance nothing read them.
Whether the facts are readable as facts
Your address, hours, services and area covered need to exist as data, not only as sentences inside a design. This is the single most common reason an assistant gets a detail wrong.
Whether your pages answer anything
Assistants quote the paragraph that answers the question. Pages written as brochure copy, all mood and no substance, give them nothing to lift and get skipped in favour of a competitor who wrote plainly.
What the rest of the web says about you
An answer is assembled from more than your own website. Reviews, directories, press mentions and your social profiles all feed it, and they need to agree with each other on the basics.
Whether there is a brief waiting for them
A short file at the root of your domain can set out who you are, what you sell and which pages to trust. Not every assistant reads one yet. The ones that do read it first.
Whether anyone is counting
Visits that arrive from an assistant can be separated out in analytics, and almost nobody has set that up. Without it you cannot tell whether any of this is working.
The free check
- The answers themselves, copied out word for word: what ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Grok say about you today
- Where the wrong details came from, where that is traceable
- Which crawlers your site currently lets in, and which it is quietly turning away
- What is missing from the data behind your pages, named page by page
- A short list of fixes in the order worth doing them, with the ones you can do yourself marked as such
- An honest line on whether any of it is worth paying for yet, including whether it is worth paying us
Read by a person, not a generator
George runs the checks and writes the report himself, which is why it takes two working days instead of ten minutes. Assistants are used to collect the raw answers, because those answers are the thing being measured. Nothing is sent to you unread.
Free, no obligation
Ask for the check.
Four fields. Nothing is added to a mailing list, and there is no follow-up sequence waiting for you.
One step you can take today
A short brief at the root of your domain, written for the assistants rather than for people.
We write one from your own published pages, checked line by line, for a flat £95.
FAQ
Answer engine optimisation is the work of being described accurately, and recommended, when someone asks an AI assistant instead of typing into a search box. It overlaps heavily with good SEO: both reward a fast site, clear structure and content that answers real questions. The difference is what you are optimising for. Search gives you a list to choose from, so being on page one is enough. An assistant gives one answer, often naming two or three businesses, and if you are not in it there is no second place to be found in.
Thirty minutes, no charge. You will leave with an honest read on the problem and a clear recommendation, whether or not you work with us.