The four moves
Four files, four signals, one weekend.
Each move below is independently valuable. You can do them in any order. Together they make your website meaningfully easier for AI assistants to parse, which means meaningfully more accurate when they describe you.
MOVE 1
Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt.
Your robots.txt file (at yoursite.com/robots.txt) tells crawlers what they can fetch. Most small-business sites have a default rule that technically allows everything, but the major AI agents look for explicit Allow directives by name. If you don't have those, some agents play it safe and skip your site.
The fix is a short block at the top of your robots.txt:
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Allow: /
User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent
Allow: /
Add more if you want — CCBot, cohere-ai, etc. The list of named agents keeps growing. Five minutes, no code changes anywhere else on the site.
MOVE 2
Write an llms.txt.
llms.txt is a small markdown file at the root of your site (yoursite.com/llms.txt) that gives AI assistants a clean, human-written index of your business. Three to five sections, one page max. The dedicated article on llms.txt goes deep on what to write; the short version:
# Your Business Name
> One-sentence summary.
## What this site is
One or two paragraphs on what you do, who you serve, where you operate.
## Primary pages
- [Home](https://yoursite.com/) — what's on the home page
- [About](https://yoursite.com/about/) — your bio and contact
- [Services](https://yoursite.com/services/) — what you sell
## What you sell
- [Service one]($price) — one-sentence description
- [Service two]($price) — one-sentence description
The trick is curation, not completeness. Plain English. No marketing copy. Update it when your business changes.
MOVE 3
Add JSON-LD structured data to your homepage.
JSON-LD is a small block of structured data — a kind of machine-readable business card — that goes inside your homepage's <head> tag. It tells AI assistants and search engines exactly what type of business you are, where you're located, and what services you offer.
The minimum useful version for a small local business:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LocalBusiness",
"name": "Your Business Name",
"description": "What you do, in one sentence.",
"url": "https://yoursite.com/",
"telephone": "+1-555-555-5555",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"addressLocality": "Your City",
"addressRegion": "Your State",
"addressCountry": "US"
},
"areaServed": "Your County, State"
}
</script>
This is the move that requires touching your site's HTML. If your site is on WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or Shopify, there's a "custom HTML" or "code injection" field for it. If you don't know where that is — that's where the kit comes in handy.
MOVE 4
Clean up the visible HTML.
The last move is unglamorous but it matters: your homepage should be parseable. AI assistants struggle when the first thing they see is a cookie banner, a paywall, an aggressive popup, or 800 lines of inline JavaScript before any actual content.
Checklist:
- Title tag — descriptive, 50-60 characters, includes what you do
- Meta description — 145-155 characters, the value prop in one sentence
- One clear H1 — the page's main heading, in plain words
- H2 structure that mirrors the page sections — Services, About, Contact, etc.
- Reduce popups — at least delay them past initial render, ideally remove the ones that aren't earning their keep
- Lazy-load fancy JavaScript — the AI parser may give up before client-side code finishes running
You don't have to be a developer to do most of this. If your CMS has a "page settings" panel, that's where the title and meta live. The popup audit is just clicking through your site like a first-time visitor and noting what gets in the way before the content loads.
Four moves. Most of them take five to thirty minutes each. Total time end-to-end for a small-business site: about a weekend.
