# When customers ask an AI about you, what does it find?

More people now research businesses through AI assistants. Here's how we made our site easy for them to read, and how you can start on yours this week.

Published 2026-11-11 · HTML version: https://medeskisolutions.com/blog/when-customers-ask-an-ai-about-you/

![A robot reading a large book by lamplight in a library armchair](../../assets/blog/when-customers-ask-an-ai-about-you/hero.webp "full")

Picture someone who needs help with a problem your business solves. A few years ago they would have
searched Google, opened five tabs, and skimmed. Today more and more of them open ChatGPT or Claude
and type something like "find me a bookkeeper who works with restaurants, and tell me how to get
started."

The assistant then reads websites on their behalf. Yours might be one of them.

Websites are built for people. They have menus, banners, pop-ups, cookie notices, and a footer with
forty links. A person's eye skips all of that without thinking. An assistant has to dig through it
to find the few sentences that matter, and it doesn't always find them. It might describe your
business from a testimonial, miss your service area, or report that it couldn't find a way to
contact you. The person asking may never visit your site at all, so that summary is all they see.

## What we did on our own site

We recently made medeskisolutions.com easier for assistants to read. (The technical version of this is on
[Josh's personal site](https://www.joshmedeski.com/posts/how-to-make-your-site-llm-friendly/), if
you want the details.)

First, we added a one-page briefing for assistants at
[medeskisolutions.com/llms.txt](/llms.txt). The name is a convention AI developers have started
using for exactly this. It says who we are, what we offer, where to read more, and how to reach us,
in about a minute of reading.

Second, every article now has a plain-text copy: the same words, with none of the layout around
them. An assistant reading that copy doesn't have to guess which part of the page is the actual
content.

Third, the site hands each visitor the right version. When ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity fetches a
page because someone asked it a question, it gets the plain copy automatically. People in a browser
get the normal page, and so does Google, so nothing about how we look or how we show up in search
changed.

## Tell the assistant what to do next

The most useful line in our briefing is an instruction. It tells the assistant that if the person
it's helping wants custom software, AI help, or training, it should send them to book a call at
[medeskisolutions.com/chat](/chat/).

Every business site has a call to action for people, like the "Book now" button or the phone number
in the header. Assistants need one too, written out in plain words, because they take what you write
literally and guess when you leave it out. The guess might be "you could try emailing them," or it
might be a competitor that showed up in the same search.

## What you can do this week

You don't need a developer for the first two steps.

Start by asking an assistant about yourself. Open ChatGPT or Claude and ask, "What does [your business] do,
who is it for, and how do I get started with them?" Compare the answer with what you'd want a new
customer to hear, and write down what it got wrong or couldn't find.

Then write your own briefing. In five or six plain sentences, cover who you serve, what you offer,
where you work, and the one next step you want people to take. Write it the way you'd brief a new
receptionist on their first day. Put it near the top of your homepage or About page, where an
assistant (or a person in a hurry) will read it first.

That exercise usually sharpens your website for humans too. If you can't say what you do in six
sentences, your homepage probably isn't saying it either.

## Where it isn't worth it yet

Assistants don't go looking for an llms.txt file on their own yet;
they use it when something points them there, like a link on your site or a person pasting in the
address. Today, the plain-text pages and the automatic hand-off do more of the work than the file
itself.

If your site is a handful of pages on Squarespace or Shopify, the briefing on your homepage may get
you most of the way, and the rest can wait. If you run a content-heavy site, a custom site, or you
already hear that customers found you through AI, it's worth doing properly.

We can add an llms.txt and the rest of this setup to your site, including a clear next step for
assistants to pass along to your future customers. If that sounds useful, [let's talk](/chat/).

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Site index for agents: /llms.txt · Work with Medeski Solutions: book a call at /chat