How to Make Your Business Quotable by AI
There's a difference between a business an AI knows about and a business an AI will recommend.
The first requires existing on the internet. The second requires being describable with confidence — and confidence, for a language model, comes from consistent, specific, structured information it can find in multiple places.
We covered why this matters — the short version being that AI answers name two or three businesses, not ten, so being "findable" is no longer the same as being found.
This post is the practical half. Here's the actual work.
1. Write service descriptions a machine can parse
The single most common failure is vagueness that sounds professional.
❌ "We offer comprehensive solutions tailored to your needs, with a commitment to quality craftsmanship and customer satisfaction."
That sentence could describe a plumber, a law firm, or a bakery. To a language model, it carries almost no information.
✅ "We replace cast-iron waste stacks in Philadelphia row homes built before 1940. Typical job takes two days. Fixed quote before we start."
Now there's something to work with: a specific service, a specific building type, a specific city, a timeframe, a pricing approach. When someone asks an AI "who replaces old cast iron pipes in Philly," the second description is a match. The first isn't a match for anything.
The test: could someone who's never met you explain what you do, to whom, and where — using only your website copy? If not, neither can a machine.
2. Add structured data (schema markup)
Schema is code on your site that states facts in a format machines read without guessing. It's invisible to visitors and unambiguous to everything else.
At minimum, implement LocalBusiness schema covering:
Business name, address, phone (exactly as they appear on your Google Business Profile)
Business type — use the most specific applicable type, e.g.
Plumberrather than genericLocalBusinessOpening hours
Service area — the actual neighborhoods and towns
Price range
Aggregate rating and review count
Then add Service schema for each individual service, and FAQPage schema for your FAQ content.
This is the difference between a machine inferring your hours from a badly formatted page and knowing them. Inference produces hedged answers. Knowledge produces confident recommendations.
If you're not technical, this is a genuinely reasonable thing to hand to whoever maintains your site — it's a well-defined, one-time job.
3. Make your reviews say what you actually do
Here's an underused lever: review text becomes part of how the internet describes your business.
A hundred reviews saying "Great service! Highly recommend!" tell an AI almost nothing about what you're good at. Twenty reviews saying "they rebuilt our back steps," "fixed the leak in our finished basement," "installed a tankless heater in a tight Philly rowhome" build a detailed public picture of your specialties.
How to influence this without being weird about it: when you ask for a review, reference the work. "If you've got a minute, a quick review mentioning the stack replacement would really help other homeowners find us." Most customers are happy to be specific — they just need a nudge about what's useful.
Never script reviews or write them yourself. Fabricated reviews get detected and removed, and the reputational and ranking damage isn't recoverable in any reasonable timeframe.
4. Answer questions in public, in plain language
AI assistants love clean question-and-answer pairs, because that's structurally what they're producing.
Two places to do this:
Your Google Business Profile Q&A. You can post questions to your own profile and answer them. Seed the eight or ten you genuinely answer on every call.
An FAQ section on your site, marked up with FAQPage schema. Write real questions in the words customers actually use — "how much does it cost to replace cast iron pipes in a row home?" not "what are our pricing structures?"
Answer them plainly and specifically. Give real numbers where you can. A price range that's honest beats "contact us for a quote," both for humans deciding whether to call and for machines deciding whether to quote you.
5. Fix your consistency problem (you probably have one)
Every place your business appears online should agree on the basics: name, address, phone, hours, services.
Conflicting information is one of the most reliable ways to make a model hedge. If your site says you're open Saturdays and your profile says you're not, an AI asked "are they open weekends?" has no confident answer to give — so it gives a vague one, or names a competitor it's surer about.
The audit: search your business name and check the first two pages. Your profile, Yelp, Facebook, industry directories, old listings you forgot existed. Fix or remove anything that disagrees with the current truth.
Pay particular attention to listings from a previous address or phone number. Those are actively harmful, and they're the most commonly overlooked.
6. Publish content that answers questions, not content that sells
The pages most likely to be cited by an AI are the ones that genuinely answer something.
A page titled "Why Choose Us" gets quoted by nobody. A page titled "What Cast Iron Pipe Replacement Actually Costs in Philadelphia Row Homes" is quotable, linkable, and matches real search intent.
You don't need volume here. Five genuinely useful pages beat fifty thin ones, and thin location-swapped pages are actively penalized now.
The ninety-day check
Do this work, then wait a quarter, then ask the major AI assistants about your business again.
The change you're looking for isn't just accuracy — it's specificity and confidence. "They're a plumbing company in Philadelphia" becoming "They specialize in cast-iron stack replacement in older Philadelphia row homes, typically fixed-quote, and reviews consistently mention clear communication" is the whole game.
That second description is one an AI will happily offer when somebody asks who to call.
Where this connects
None of this replaces the fundamentals. Your Google Business Profile is still the foundation — it's the richest structured source about your business that exists, and everything above either feeds it or reinforces it.
What's changed is the payoff. The same work that used to earn you a spot in the map pack now also determines whether you exist inside an AI's answer. Same effort. Considerably higher stakes.
Want to know how AI currently describes your business?
I'll run the check, send you the raw answers, and flag exactly what's making you sound vague. Free, no pitch.
Schema markup, consistent details and a finished profile are included in every build, not sold as an SEO retainer.
Want to know how AI currently describes your business? We'll run the check, send you the raw answers, and flag exactly what's making you sound vague. Free, no pitch. Get your free AI visibility check →