Getting Found in AI Search: What Your Business Website Needs in 2026

A growing share of your future clients will never see your homepage first. They will ask an AI assistant "who builds client portals for law firms in Yorkshire?" or read Google's AI answer at the top of the results, and only then click through to whoever was mentioned.

That changes what a good website needs to do. It still has to persuade people, but it also has to be easy for machines to read, understand and quote.

How AI answers find you

AI search tools mostly work in two steps. They search the web (or their own index) for pages that look relevant, then they read those pages and write an answer, often with links to sources.

So the old basics still matter: if your page is not indexed, slow, or vague, it will not be picked. What changes is the second step. A page that states facts clearly is far more likely to be quoted than one written as marketing fog.

1. Say plainly who you are and what you do

Write the sentence you want an AI to repeat. For example: "We are a family law firm in Leeds handling divorce, child arrangements and financial settlements." Not "We put families first."

Every service page should answer the obvious questions in plain words:

• What the service is and who it is for
• Where you work (town, region, remote)
• Typical timescales and, where you can, prices
• What happens after someone gets in touch

2. Add structured data

Structured data (schema.org markup) is a small block of code that tells search engines, in a fixed format, facts like your business name, address, services, reviews and opening hours. People never see it; machines rely on it.

At minimum, most service businesses should have:

• Organization or LocalBusiness with your name, logo, address and contact details
• Service entries for what you sell
• BreadcrumbList so pages make sense in context
• Article or BlogPosting on posts like this one

This site does exactly that on every project and article, generated automatically from the content, so it never goes out of date.

3. Consider an llms.txt file

llms.txt is a proposed convention: a plain text file at the root of your site that summarises who you are and links to your most important pages, written for AI tools rather than browsers. It is not an official standard and not every AI crawler reads it, but it takes an hour to write and does no harm.

Think of llms.txt as the elevator pitch you would give a researcher, with links to the evidence.

4. Make it fast and readable without JavaScript

Many crawlers do not run JavaScript, or run very little. If your content only appears after a heavy script loads, some systems will see an empty page. Server-rendered pages (Laravel, or Next.js with server components) avoid this by sending the full text in the first response.

Speed still matters too. Slow pages are crawled less often and lose visitors who do click through.

5. Show real evidence

AI answers favour sources that look trustworthy. The same things that convince a human help here:

• Case studies with named clients (with permission) and concrete outcomes
• Reviews and testimonials that mention specific work
• An author or team page with real names and experience
• Accurate, consistent contact details everywhere you are listed

A portfolio of real projects does more for this than any amount of copywriting.

What not to do

Don't publish hundreds of thin AI-generated pages hoping to be picked up. Search engines are explicitly targeting scaled low-value content, and AI answers draw on the same quality signals. A dozen genuinely useful pages beat a thousand generic ones.

Quick checklist

1. Each service has its own page that says plainly what, who, where and how much.
2. Structured data for your business, services and articles.
3. An llms.txt file pointing to your key pages.
4. Content rendered on the server and pages that load fast on a phone.
5. Real case studies, reviews and named people.

If you would like your site checked against this list, or rebuilt so it ticks every box by default, get in touch.