The 7-point AI visibility checklist for local businesses

Ask an AI assistant for “a good electrician near me” and it will name two or three businesses, not ten. Whether yours is among them comes down to a short list of technical and content basics, most of which take an afternoon to fix. Here are the seven points, each with a quick way to check where you stand. They work just as well if you audit prospects’ sites before pitching them.

1. Allow AI search crawlers

Assistants can only recommend what they can fetch. OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot are the crawlers behind ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude answers, and overzealous “block AI” rules often lock them out along with the training bots (see which crawlers to allow vs block). Check: open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and make sure none of those four names appears under a Disallow rule.

2. Add LocalBusiness structured data

Schema.org JSON-LD tells machines, unambiguously, that you’re a real business at a real address with real opening hours. It’s the difference between an assistant guessing your details and knowing them. Check: view your homepage’s source and search for ld+json; if it’s missing, this is the first job for your developer.

3. Answer real questions on your pages

AI answers quote pages that already contain answers. If a customer’s top five questions (prices, hours, emergency service, service area, parking) have no literal answer anywhere on your site, a model has nothing to work with. Check: write those five questions down and try to answer each one with a sentence copied from your own site.

4. Don’t hide critical content behind JavaScript

Most AI crawlers don’t execute JavaScript. If your content is assembled in the browser, machines often see an empty shell. Check: open your page’s source code (view source, not the inspector) and search for your opening hours or a service name. Not in the raw HTML means invisible to most AI.

5. State the basics as text

Opening hours in an image, prices in a downloadable PDF, the address only in a footer graphic: all unreadable to most machines (and to screen readers). Hours, address, services and at least price ranges belong on the page as plain, selectable text. Check: try to select and copy each of those facts with your mouse; if you can’t, a crawler can’t read them either.

6. Add an llms.txt

An emerging convention: a short markdown file at /llms.txt summarizing who you are, what you offer and where the key pages live. Adoption is young and there are no guarantees, but it’s a half-hour job with possible upside and no downside. Check: visit yourdomain.com/llms.txt. A 404 means you don’t have one.

7. Stay fast and mobile-friendly

Speed and mobile usability still gate everything else: slow, broken pages get abandoned by users and deprioritized by every system that ranks sources, AI answers included. If your site takes six seconds to load, fixing that beats any llms.txt. Check: run your URL through PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score first.

How to work the list

Points 1, 4 and 5 decide whether machines can read you at all. Fix those first. Point 2 is an afternoon of developer time, point 3 is an ongoing content habit, and points 6 and 7 round things off. For freelancers and agencies: every failed point on a prospect’s site is a concrete, verifiable pitch opener: “ChatGPT can’t read your website” starts a very different conversation than “I build websites.”

Check your site in 10 seconds

The free ScanToPitch AI Visibility Check at scantopitch.com/audit runs all seven checks instantly and shows you exactly where a site stands, no signup required.