12 results, in reading order. Everything below is the article.
AI answer illustration: written by Carl, not by a real AI tool
Get your basics right for Google and you’re most of the way there. The advice for the new robot answers is the same advice, plus two extra checks: let the right bots in, and say things in plain text.
- 5 questions a real customer might type. Ask them before you change anything.
- 0 tricks. Google says there is no special markup or new file to add.1
- 24 hours for OpenAI’s search system to notice a robots.txt change.2
- Weeks before a page you fixed is crawled again. A weekend tells you nothing.5
Open ChatGPT right now and ask it “who is the best [your type of business] in [your town]?” Go on, I’ll wait. Whatever it says about you (or doesn’t!) is where everything below starts, and I’d do it before reading another word.
The funny thing is that most of what follows is dull. There’s no secret trick, and Google says so itself, which I’ll come to. But dull is good news: it means a small business with an afternoon and a cup of tea can do nearly all of it.
The timings and the order on this page are my teaching view. Every number comes from a source you can open, and they’re listed at the bottom.
Featured snippet
There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.
GGoogle Search Central, on AI features and your websitedevelopers.google.com › search › docs › appearance › ai-features1
What do they say about you?
Step 1 · Tonight, 20 minutes Grab a pen and scribble down five questions a real customer might type. Not “best marketing agency”, more like “can I get my laptop screen fixed in Ari on a Saturday?”. Pop them into ChatGPT, then into Google, and have a look at the little summary box at the top if you get one. Screenshot every answer! You’ll want that before picture later, trust me.
People also ask
What should I look for in the answers?
What we look for is whether you’re mentioned at all, whether what they say about you is actually true, and who gets mentioned instead of you. That last bit is gold, since those are the sites you want to be sitting next to.
Do people really ask AI for local recommendations?
Yes, they really do, and a lot more than they used to. In a BrightLocal survey of 1,002 people in the US, 45% said they use AI tools such as ChatGPT to find local places, against only 6% a year before. Quite a jump!6 Those are American figures, not Bangkok ones, but the direction is very hard to argue with. And when there’s an AI summary on the page, Pew found people clicked a normal result on 8% of visits, against 15% when there wasn’t one, so you’ll find fewer of them wandering off to your site.3 Sam Altman also says ChatGPT has passed 800 million weekly users.9 Being the answer is worth a lot more than it used to be.
What does a “before” sheet look like?
Check you haven’t slammed the door
Step 2 · Tonight, 5 minutes Google’s summary boxes (AI Overviews and AI Mode, if you want the proper names) are built from pages in the normal search results. So if you can’t be found the old way, you won’t be found the new way, simple as that. Their own help page says a page has to be indexed and allowed to show a snippet, and even then there are no promises.1
So my first job for anybody is a very dull one. Type yourdomain.com/robots.txt into a browser and read what it says. It’s a tiny file, but a security plugin or some old setting from a developer can slam the door behind your back, and you’d never even know. Paste yours in below, or try the examples.
- Googlebot
- OAI-SearchBot
- GPTBot
People also ask
What about ChatGPT? Is it the same bot?
ChatGPT does its own thing, really. Its maker has a little robot called OAI-SearchBot that wanders the web, and it “is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features”. Block it and you’re out of those answers, which would be a great shame. There’s also a second robot, GPTBot, but that one is only about training, so you can block it if you like and just leave the first one alone.2
Does robots.txt keep a page out of Google?
Say it plainly, in text
Step 3 · Evenings 2 to 4 Start with your home page, since that’s where most people land. Tell them what you sell, who it’s for and where you are, in plain words, right at the top, and skip the word “solutions” (please). If a stranger can’t work out what you do in five seconds, a machine summarising the page can’t either. Flip the switch to see what I mean. (This is my own illustration of the idea, not the output of any real tool.)
Innovative solutions for all your tech needs
Trusted. Professional. Passionate about technology.
A summary of that page might say
A company offering technology solutions.
Where? What for? Open when? It can’t say.
People also ask
What about my services?
Next up, your services. I really like a separate page for each one, written as if you were explaining it to a friend across a table. How does it work? Who is it for? What happens when they ring? Squash nine services into one paragraph and you end up answering none of them, which is a bit sad for the poor customer.
What about my business details?
Then comes the boring-but-brilliant bit, your business details. Your name, address, phone number and opening hours should match everywhere they pop up, whether that’s your website, your Google Business Profile, your Facebook page or some directory you signed up to years ago, down to the last comma. Google’s help page says “businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results”.4 It’s the cheapest win on this list (an hour tonight and you’re done!). Our old post on ranking on Google Maps covers the profile side.
How do I use the questions I scribbled down?
After that I’d go back to the questions you scribbled down. They all deserve a page, or at least a proper heading on a page, with the answer in the first line and the detail underneath, in your customers’ words and not yours. The emails and LINE messages people already send you are the best list of questions you will ever get!
Where should prices and opening times live?
Finally, have a look at your opening times and prices. If they only live inside a picture or a PDF, type them out on the page. Google recommends “making sure that important content is available in textual form”.1
Get believed, by other people
Step 4 · Ongoing Reviews really do count for loads, because what other folk say about you can’t be faked. You can ask a happy customer for a review while they’re still smiling, and then write back politely to the grumpy ones. Please don’t buy them, it just isn’t worth the risk. That same survey also found 97% of people read online reviews when they’re thinking about a local business.6
People also ask
Who else should mention me?
Now go and get yourself mentioned by somebody else. A local directory, a supplier’s “who we work with” page, an article in your industry, a podcast, even a helpful answer on a forum. A mention on a site that’s already trusted does more than ten posts on your blog telling everyone how good you are. (That last bit is my teaching view. Google’s own line is that trust is “most important” of the things it looks for.8)
Should I write for the robots?
Last, and I really mean this, don’t write for the robots. Stiff pages stuffed with keywords are worse for the poor humans who still have to ring you. Google’s guidance says the same: make “people-first content”, not “search engine-first content”.8 The principle hasn’t moved since this was all new: be clear, be correct, be easy to find.
Then wait, and check again
Step 5 · A few weeks later Give it time, because Google admits that crawling “can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks”.5 A weekend tells you nothing at all, so be patient and make yourself a cuppa. Then, a few weeks on, I’d run the same five questions again and put the answers next to your screenshots, and you can write down what changed, even if all you can write is “nothing yet”. Pick your weeks to see where the “before” and “after” photos sit.
People also ask
How will I see the traffic?
If you’ve verified your site in Google Search Console, visits from the summary boxes are counted in the normal “Web” search type in the Performance report, so you can see for yourself whether any of it is arriving, which is very handy.1
Can anyone promise me a spot in these answers?
I should say that nobody can promise you a spot in these answers, and if somebody does then they’re guessing (and probably wanting your money). All you can do is make your site the easiest site for a person, or a machine, to understand and quote.
What to do, and what to ignore
Do
- Say what you sell, for whom and where, at the top of the page
- One page per service, in plain words
- The same name, address, phone and hours everywhere
- Type out prices and opening times as text
- Earn reviews and mentions from other sites
Ignore
- Anyone who guarantees you a place in AI answers
- A special AI text file or markup “for Google’s AI”
- Pages stuffed with keywords
- Bought reviews
Google says it plainly: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features.”1
How ready is your site, really?
Here are eight yes-or-no questions, lifted straight from the checklist above. Be honest with yourself! You can tap the ones you can say yes to today, and the meter will fill up as you go (don’t worry, your answers never leave this device).
This is a teaching tool I made from the checklist, not a Google or OpenAI score. No tool can tell you whether you’ll be quoted.
A week of evenings, with a cup of tea
If you’d rather do it yourself first, here’s the order I’d go in. It’s my teaching view, not a study. Each day has a link to the free guide behind it.
Take your before picture
Tick them off as you go. Your progress stays on this device.
0 of 5 done
Then come back in a few weeks and ask again. And tell me what ChatGPT said about yours. I’m nosy.
The full answer
So, how do you show up in the robot answers?
Back to the questions you scribbled down on night one, like the laptop screen in Ari on a Saturday. A few weeks later you ask them all again, and then you put the new answers next to your screenshots. You might be named now and you might not, but you will know why, because you’ve checked the door, said what you do in plain words, and asked a few people to say it for you too.
That’s the answer, really, and there’s no trick to it. Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in its summaries, so you just need to do the dull basics very well, let the right bots in, and then wait. Nobody can promise you a spot, and I’d run a mile from anybody who does!
What you have at the end
You have a before picture and an after picture, which most businesses never take, and a site that’s easier for people to understand, which is the thing that helps with Google too. My own guess, and it’s only my teaching view, is that it takes about a week of evenings to do the work, and then a few weeks of waiting. Google says crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks,5 and OpenAI says a robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to reach its search.2
Is it worth the effort? The survey from BrightLocal says 45% of the 1,002 Americans they asked now use these tools to find local places, up from 6% the year before.6 Those are American numbers, so don’t quote them to your bank manager in Bangkok. But I’d much rather be ready than not, and it’s all really useful anyway, because a clear page, tidy details and happy reviews will also help you with plain old Google.
What to do next
This week, you just need to take your before picture. Ask the questions, save the answers, read your robots.txt, and make a note of who got named instead of you. That’s an evening, and a cup of tea, and you can do it on the sofa.
This month, you can fix what you found. Put a first line on your home page that says what you sell and where, and give all your services a page of their own. Then make your name, address and phone number the same everywhere, and type out your prices and opening hours so they aren’t stuck in a picture.
After that, I’d keep asking for reviews and keep an eye on who else mentions you. Then ask your questions again every month or so, and save the answers. It’s a bit slow, I know, but it all adds up, and you will start to see which changes did something.
How people learn this
You learn it by looking at your own site the way a stranger would, and by asking the machines what they say about you (which can be a bit of a shock!). The usual mistakes are blocking a bot by accident with a security plugin, hiding your prices in a PDF, paying for reviews, and giving up after a weekend. We all make at least one of those, really.
If you’d like a bit of reading, Google has a starter guide that describes the job as helping search engines understand your content, and helping people decide whether to visit.10 The page about its summary features is short and very clear, and you can read it in ten minutes.1 OpenAI also has a page that lists its bots, so you can check which ones you want to let in.2
The short version
- Ask the machines about your business first, and save the answers.
- Check your robots.txt isn’t blocking the bots you want.
- Say it plainly, in text, and keep your details the same everywhere.
- Get other people to mention you, then wait, then ask again.
Courses we’d suggest
Our AI for Marketing, Content & Search course is the one for this. It’s 5 evenings over 3 weeks, and one of the sessions is all about search now that chatbots have joined in, and you will finish by building a complete campaign, ideally for your own business.
If you’re starting from scratch with marketing, you’ll want Digital Marketing Essentials first, which is 8 lessons over 4 weeks in Bangkok. And if you’d like your whole team to look after this together, we also run a two-day workshop for companies, SEO & AI Answers for Teams.
AI for Marketing, Content & Search
Use AI to understand the market better, not to fill the internet with more average content. One session is all about search now that chatbots have joined in, and you finish by building a complete AI-assisted campaign, ideally for your own business.
- 5 lessonsover 3 weeks, part-time
- Tue & Thu6pm to 9pm, evening classes
- Small grouplive in Bangkok or live online
- No AI experienceneeded; basic marketing familiarity helps
Where the numbers come from
- developers.google.comAI features and your websiteGoogle Search Central. No additional requirements or special optimisations; no new files or schema; indexed and snippet-eligible; traffic counted under Web in Search Console; important content as text.
- developers.openai.comOverview of OpenAI crawlersOpenAI. OAI-SearchBot vs GPTBot; “~24 hours” for robots.txt changes to take effect in search.
- pewresearch.orgGoogle users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appearsPew Research Center, July 2025. 8% vs 15% of visits; 1% clicked a link in the summary; 900 US adults, March 2025.
- support.google.comTips to improve your local ranking on GoogleGoogle Business Profile Help. Complete and accurate info; relevance, distance, prominence.
- developers.google.comAsk Google to recrawl your URLsGoogle Search Central. “A few days to a few weeks”.
- brightlocal.comLocal Consumer Review Survey 2026BrightLocal. 1,002 US adults: 45% use AI tools for local recommendations (6% in 2025); 97% read reviews.
- developers.google.comIntroduction to robots.txtGoogle Search Central.
- developers.google.comCreating helpful, reliable, people-first contentGoogle Search Central. People-first vs search-engine-first; “trust is most important”.
- techcrunch.comSam Altman says ChatGPT has hit 800M weekly active usersTechCrunch, 6 October 2025. Said at OpenAI DevDay.
- developers.google.comSEO Starter Guide: The BasicsGoogle Search Central. SEO is about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users decide whether to visit.
