Your website might be actively preventing AI tools from seeing, understanding, or citing your business. These five mistakes are extremely common — most small business websites have at least two of them — and every one has a straightforward fix.
1. Your robots.txt blocks AI crawlers
This is the big one. Your robots.txt file (found at yourdomain.com/robots.txt) tells bots which parts of your site they can and can't access. Many WordPress themes, security plugins, and hosting providers add rules that block AI crawlers by default.
The bots you need to allow are: GPTBot (OpenAI/ChatGPT), ClaudeBot (Anthropic/Claude), and PerplexityBot (Perplexity). If any of these appear after a "Disallow" rule, the corresponding AI tool cannot read your site at all.
The fix: Check your robots.txt right now. If you see lines like "User-agent: GPTBot" followed by "Disallow: /", remove them. If you're not comfortable editing the file yourself, your web developer can do it in under 5 minutes. This single change can be the difference between complete AI invisibility and being recommendable.
2. No schema markup
Schema markup is structured data that tells machines what your website is about in a standardised format. Without it, AI tools have to guess your business type, location, services, and opening hours by reading your content like a human would. With it, they get a clean data feed in milliseconds.
For a local business, the key schema types are LocalBusiness (or a more specific type like Plumber, Electrician, or Dentist), with properties for name, address, telephone, opening hours, service area, and geo coordinates.
The fix: If you use WordPress, install or update Yoast SEO and fill in the Local SEO settings. If you have a custom site, use Google's free Structured Data Markup Helper to generate the code, then paste it into your homepage. Test it with Google's Rich Results Test tool to make sure it's valid.
3. Thin content pages
A homepage that says "Welcome to Smith Plumbing. We provide quality plumbing services. Call us today." gives AI almost nothing to work with. There's no specific information about what you do, where you do it, how long you've been doing it, or why someone should choose you.
AI tools need concrete facts. Service descriptions, pricing guides, location details, years of experience, specific qualifications, case studies — the more specific and factual your content is, the more useful it is for AI citation.
The fix: Expand your main pages. Your homepage should mention your specific services, your location and service area, and a couple of concrete differentiators. Your services page should have a detailed section for each service you offer. Think about the questions customers ask and answer them directly on the page.
4. JavaScript rendered content
Some modern websites load their content dynamically using JavaScript. This looks fine in a browser, but many AI crawlers can't execute JavaScript — they see a blank page or a loading spinner instead of your content.
This is especially common with single page applications built in React, Vue, or Angular, and with some website builders that render content client side.
The fix: Check whether your content is visible without JavaScript. The easiest way is to view your page source (right click → View Page Source in your browser). If you can see your text content in the HTML source, you're fine. If the source is mostly empty JavaScript files, you need server side rendering or static HTML. Talk to your developer about this — it's a bigger fix but an important one.
5. Your business name is unrecognisable
This one's subtle but surprisingly common. If your business name on your website doesn't exactly match your name on Google, directories, and review sites, AI tools might not connect them as the same business.
Common mismatches: using a trading name on your website but your legal name on Google Business Profile, abbreviating differently across platforms (J&S vs J and S vs Johnson & Smith), or having a different name on your old Yell listing that you forgot to update.
The fix: Pick one exact version of your business name and use it everywhere. Your website, Google Business Profile, every directory, every review platform, and your social media profiles should all show the identical name. This also helps with building the consistent citations AI tools look for.
How many of these affect your site?
Most small business websites have at least two of these issues. The first three — robots.txt, schema, and thin content — are by far the most common and the most impactful to fix. If you sort those three out, you've removed the biggest barriers between your business and AI recommendations.
Our GEO Starter audit checks all five of these plus your third party visibility. Or if you just want a quick sanity check, send us your website URL and we'll take a look.