More people now ask ChatGPT, Copilot or Google’s AI for a recommendation instead of scrolling through results. For a local business, the question is simple: when someone asks “who’s good for this in Dundee?”, does the answer include you?
We don’t have to guess how much AI tools read business websites. We host 200+ of them, and the server logs show it. Here’s what we see, and what it means for yours.
AI tools read a lot, and send very few visitors
In one week this autumn, across the sites we host:
- ChatGPT fetched pages live, on behalf of a person asking it a question, 1,687 times.
- It sent roughly 150 visitors to those sites.
- OpenAI’s search crawler read more pages than Googlebot did over the same week.
So for every visitor ChatGPT sent, it read a page for someone about ten times. Your website is increasingly being used to answer questions for people who never arrive. You don’t get the visit, but you can still get the recommendation, if what the AI reads is clear. (There’s more on the numbers in Can I Bing it?)
What the AI tools need from your site
An AI assistant summarising your business is a bit like a stranger skim-reading your home page in ten seconds. It picks up whatever is stated plainly, and misses or muddles whatever isn’t.
Say what you do, where, and for whom, in plain words
“Innovative solutions for tomorrow’s challenges” gives an AI nothing to repeat. “Family law solicitors in Dundee, specialising in divorce and child arrangements” gives it everything. Put that sentence near the top of your home page and in your page titles.
State your facts as facts
Your address, phone number, opening hours, the areas you cover, your prices if you publish them: as text, on the page, the same everywhere. Facts hidden in images, PDFs or clever graphics are facts an AI can’t use.
Use structured data
Structured data states your business type, location and contact details in a format machines read directly. In our Dundee benchmark, only 18 of 100 local business sites had it. Those 18 are far easier for an AI to describe accurately.
Answer the questions people actually ask
“How much does it cost?” “Do you cover Broughty Ferry?” “How quickly can you come out?” Pages and FAQs that answer real questions directly are exactly what an AI looks for when someone asks it the same thing.
Don’t lock the crawlers out by accident
Some security tools and “block AI” settings shut out the crawlers that feed AI search along with the junk. Blocking the ones that train AI models is a reasonable choice for some businesses. Blocking the ones that search takes you out of the answers. Know which is which before you switch anything on.
Check what the AI says about you
Ask ChatGPT, Copilot and Google’s AI about your business and your services, the way a customer would:
- “What does [your business] do?”
- “Who’s a good [your service] in Dundee?”
- “What are [your business]’s opening hours?”
If the answer is wrong, out of date or about a competitor, it tells you exactly which facts your site isn’t stating clearly enough. Fix those, and check again in a few weeks.
Measuring it
Visits from ChatGPT often arrive tagged with chatgpt.com as the source, so they show up in your analytics if you look for them. They’re still small numbers for most businesses. The reading happens at a much bigger scale than the visiting, and that’s the part worth preparing for.
Making sure search engines and AI tools understand your business is part of our SEO work. Ask us to check what the AI tools say about you.
Got a problem like this? Good. We like those.
Tell us what you’re dealing with and we’ll tell you honestly what we’d do.
