Fazley RabbiA customer asks ChatGPT who builds good business websites in Rajshahi, or asks Gemini to suggest a caterer in Natore. Your business does not appear. Or worse, the answer gets your services, area or phone number wrong. You cannot pay these assistants to include you, and there is no simple sign-up that puts your business into their answers. What you can do is make the facts about your business much easier for them to find and trust.
Where AI assistants get their answers
Broadly, an AI assistant answers from two places:
- What it learned during training, from a large amount of public text collected up to some point in the past. This only changes when the model is updated.
- What it finds by searching the web at the moment of the question, which many assistants now do, especially for local or current questions. Here it behaves much like a fast reader of search results: it looks at pages, listings and mentions, then summarises them.
Either way, the assistant can only repeat what is clearly written somewhere it can read. If your business information lives mostly in Facebook posts, photos of price lists and WhatsApp chats, there is very little for it to work with.
Put your core facts in plain, public text
- Write a clear About page on your own website: business name, what you do, who you serve, where you are, which areas you cover and how to contact you. Use full sentences, not only a logo and a tagline.
- Give each main service its own page explaining what it is, who it is for, how it works and where you offer it.
- Add a questions-and-answers section with the questions customers really ask, each answered directly in the first sentence.
- Keep important facts in text, not only in images. Price lists, menus and opening hours inside a picture are hard for machines to read reliably.
- Add structured data (Organization or LocalBusiness schema) with your name, address, phone and website, matching what the page says.
- Write in the languages your customers use. If people ask in Bangla, Bangla text on your site gives the assistant something to match.
Be consistent everywhere else
When information about you conflicts, with an old address here and a different phone number there, an assistant may repeat the wrong version or leave you out. Your name, address, phone, services and hours should match across your website, Google Business Profile, Facebook page and directories; consistent business listings explains how to clean this up.
Mentions by others matter too: a local news story, an industry association listing, a supplier's partner page, genuine reviews. These are earned slowly. Do not buy fake mentions or post fake reviews; they break platform rules and feed wrong information to the very tools you want to reach.
Check you are not blocking them
Some website security settings, hosting firewalls or robots.txt rules block the crawlers that AI companies use. Blocking them is a valid choice for some sites, but if you want to be found, ask your developer what your site currently allows.
Keep expectations realistic
Nobody controls what an AI assistant says. Answers vary between tools, between days and with how the question is worded. What you control is whether accurate, consistent information about you exists and is easy to read. That work also helps your normal Google results, which is why it overlaps so much with SEO; the SEO, AEO, GEO and AIO article explains how they fit together.
The smallest useful first step
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude the question a customer would ask, such as "who is a good caterer in Natore", and also ask each one directly about your business by name. Note what they get right and wrong. Every wrong fact points to a page or listing to fix first. If you would like help with that, my SEO, AEO and GEO service covers it.