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.
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, if you want the details.)
First, we added a one-page briefing for assistants at medeskisolutions.com/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.
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.
