Ask the AI about your business before your customers do

In Part 1 we looked at the numbers behind zero-click search: most Google searches now end without anyone visiting a website, and AI summaries cut clicks to regular results roughly in half. For a membership business, that means the answer itself is where many buyers decide.

So the first job is simple. Find out what the answer says about you.

Many owners never check. They see their own website and their own Google listing, and they assume the AI repeats them. It often doesn't. An AI answer draws on many sources at once, and some of them are years out of date.

Where an AI answer comes from

Pew Research Center studied Google's AI summaries in March 2025. In 88% of them, the summary cited three or more sources. Only 1% relied on a single source. Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit were the most common sources, together making up 15% of the links the summaries listed.

Your website is one voice in that mix. A two-year-old directory listing with your old intro price is another. So is a Reddit thread complaining about a cancellation policy you changed last spring. The assistant blends them, and the buyer reads the blend.

1. 1Your websiteHours, prices, offer, schedule
2. 2Your listingsGoogle Business Profile, Apple Maps, Yelp, directories
3. 3Other people's pagesReviews, Reddit, YouTube, local articles
4. 4The answerOne paragraph the buyer reads before deciding

Almost 1 in 5 sites in our Agent Ready sample sat behind a bot wall. When an assistant can't read your site, the other sources fill the gap.

The monthly check

All this takes is 30 minutes and a spreadsheet.

1. Write ten questions your buyers ask

   Use their words, not yours. "Best Pilates studio near [your neighborhood]." "How much is a membership at [your brand]?" "Does [your brand] have a free first class?" "Is [your brand] open at 6 a.m. on Saturday?" Include two questions that don't name you at all.

2. Ask three assistants

   Google (with the AI Overview or AI Mode), ChatGPT with search turned on, and one more your customers use, such as Claude, Gemini or Perplexity. Use a private window, so your own history doesn't color the answer.

3. Grade every fact

   For each answer, mark each fact right, wrong or missing: locations, hours, price, intro offer, cancellation terms. For the questions that don't name you, note whether you appear at all and who appears instead.

4. Note the source of each wrong fact

   Most answers show their links. Click them. The wrong price usually lives on a specific page you can name.

5. Save the sheet and repeat next month

   The value is in the trend. A fact that was wrong in March and right in May tells you a fix worked.

For a multi-location brand, run the check on three locations each month: your best, your newest and one that is struggling. Rotate the rest through the year.

How to fix what comes back wrong

Start with your own site. Hours, prices, the intro offer and the class schedule should appear as plain text on a page a crawler can reach. A price that only appears inside an image, a PDF or a pop-up is one an assistant has to guess.

Then your listings. In its guidance on AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google tells site owners to keep their Business Profile information up to date. It also says there are no extra requirements for appearing in those features: no new machine-readable files and no special structured data. For Google, the ordinary basics carry most of the weight.

Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links.

Next, check your robots.txt and any security settings that block bots. OpenAI says plainly that a site which blocks its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, won't appear in ChatGPT search answers. Anthropic says the same about Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User: blocking them may reduce your visibility in Claude's search. Many sites block these bots by accident, through a security plugin or a hosting default. We wrote about who controls that setting in You don't own your own front door.

Last, the pages you don't control. You can't edit a Reddit thread, but you can reply to it with the current policy. You can ask a directory to update an old listing, answer reviews that quote old prices, and post a short video that states the offer clearly. Each one gives the assistant a more recent source to draw on.

What to expect

These fixes don't show up overnight. OpenAI says a robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to register for its search. Listings and third-party pages take longer, because each assistant has to revisit them. That's why the check is monthly: you are looking for the wrong facts to drop off one by one.

Some answers you won't control. An assistant may recommend a competitor for a question that never names you, and no single fix changes that. What you can control is that when you do appear, the price, the hours and the offer are right. A buyer who reads a wrong price and then sees a different one at the front desk trusts you less, whoever made the mistake.

Next in After the Click: how to measure marketing when website traffic falls while bookings hold, and which numbers to put in front of your team instead.

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Sources

• Pew Research Center, "Do people click on links in Google AI summaries?," July 22, 2025. pewresearch.org
• Google Search Central, "AI Features and Your Website." developers.google.com
• OpenAI, "Overview of OpenAI Crawlers." developers.openai.com
• Anthropic, "Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler?" support.anthropic.com
• Sneeze It, Agent Ready research across 98 websites. agentready.sneeze.it