2026-08-03 · Jack Stovell
How to get your business cited by AI assistants
More buying research now starts as a question to an AI assistant: "best review-request tool for small businesses", "who makes X in the UK". The assistant searches, reads what it can, and answers with the companies whose pages survived that reading. For a small business this is a rare open window — the incumbents' advantage in domain authority matters less to a system that reads pages than it did to one that counted links.
We run several small products ourselves, publish our own AI-citation scoreboard, and got every one of our businesses AI-readable the hard way. This is the layer-by-layer version of what that took.
Layer 0: can crawlers read your site at all?
Before anything clever: several major hosts and CDNs now ship with AI crawlers blocked by default — a switch you never flipped, silently returning 403s to exactly the systems you want reading you. We've hit this on our own domains more than once. Fetch your site with an AI crawler's user agent, or run it through [our free checker](https://hilyt.it/tools/ai-visibility), before spending an hour on anything below.
Layer 1: facts a model can repeat
An assistant recommending your business needs to state what you do, for whom, and at what price — without inferring it from marketing copy. Audit your homepage for the sentence a stranger would need: most say "transform your workflow" somewhere prominent and never plainly say "we make review-request software for UK service businesses, from £6.99/month". The plain sentence is the quotable one.
Layer 2: identity markup that says Organization
Schema.org Organization JSON-LD tells systems your business is a company — its name, its own domain as the canonical `url`, its founder, its other surfaces as `sameAs`. One modelling rule matters more than the rest: **your company's `url` must be its own website.** Directory pages, social profiles and everything else belong in `sameAs`. Markup that gets this backwards teaches models that some platform's page *is* your business.
A founder link matters too: "who is behind X?" is one of the questions assistants actually get asked, and it's answerable only if some page connects the company to a person a model can resolve.
Layer 3: an llms.txt and a profile built to be read
The emerging convention for AI-facing sites is a plain-text summary at `/llms.txt` — the facts, without the design. Every one of our products publishes one, and they're what we use as the source when we publish anything else about those businesses, so no surface ever says something the company's own site doesn't.
A hilyt business profile packages this whole stack: Organization JSON-LD with your domain as canonical, founder resolution, dated claims each carrying a source URL and a one-click owner verification, crawler-rendered HTML, and a plain-text card at `/<name>/llm.txt`. It's free, and the same page also works as the "who are we" link humans ask for.
What we won't tell you
We won't tell you this guarantees recommendations — model output isn't for sale, and our own [public scoreboard](https://hilyt.it/geo) shows exactly how far along we are on our own queries. What the work above changes is the denominator: when the search runs, your business is one of the ones the assistant *could* cite. Most of your competitors currently aren't.