AI assistants don’t hand out a ranked list of ten links. When someone asks for a recommendation, the model names a few businesses, or one, and moves on. So the real question isn’t “how do I rank higher?” It’s “what makes an AI confident enough to say my name?”
After scanning thousands of sites, the same eight signals come up again and again. Together they decide whether a model can read you, understand you, trust you and recommend you. Here’s each one, what it means in plain English, and the quickest win to improve it.
1. Semantic HTML structure
AI systems use your headings and page structure to build an outline of what your content is about. If your headings skip levels, or everything is styled to look like a heading without actually being one, that outline gets muddled.
Quick win: use one clear H1 per page, then H2 and H3 in order. Style with CSS, not by picking a bigger heading tag.
2. AI answer readiness
Models love content that already looks like an answer. Pages built around real questions, with the answer stated immediately underneath, are far easier to quote than a wall of marketing copy.
Quick win: add a short FAQ to your key pages, phrasing each question exactly as a customer would ask it, with a direct answer first.
3. Entity clarity
Before an AI recommends you, it needs to be sure who you are: your business name, what you do, where you operate and how to reach you. Ambiguity here makes a model hesitant to name you.
Quick win: make your About and Contact pages unambiguous, and keep your business name, address and details consistent everywhere they appear.
4. Structured data
Schema.org markup is a machine-readable summary of your page: it spells out that you’re a LocalBusiness, that this is a review, that this is your address. It removes guesswork for the model.
Quick win: add Organization (or LocalBusiness) schema to your homepage, and FAQ schema to pages with a Q&A section.
5. Topical authority
One thin page on a subject rarely earns a recommendation. Depth does. When you cover a topic thoroughly, and link those pages together sensibly, you signal genuine expertise.
Quick win: pick your most important service and build a small cluster of supporting pages around it, each linking to the others.
6. AI crawler accessibility
None of the above matters if the AI’s crawler can’t reach your site. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others each fetch your pages, and a stray line in your robots.txt or an aggressive firewall can quietly block them.
Quick win: check that your robots.txt allows the major AI crawlers, and that your sitemap is listed. Being invisible to the crawler means being invisible in the answer.
7. Content extractability
Even great content can be hard to lift if it’s buried in dense paragraphs. Lists, tables, short paragraphs and clear labels make it easy for a model to pull out a clean, quotable fact.
Quick win: break long sections into scannable chunks. Turn “we offer X, Y and Z” prose into an actual list.
8. Content freshness
Models favour information that looks current. A page with no date, last touched three years ago, reads as stale, and stale content is a weaker thing to recommend.
Quick win: show publish or updated dates, keep cornerstone pages reviewed, and refresh anything with a year in the title.
Where to start
You don’t need to fix all eight at once. In practice, two give the fastest return for most sites: crawler accessibility (because it unlocks everything else) and answer readiness (because it directly shapes what a model can quote). Sort those, then work down the list by impact.
If you’d rather not audit all eight by hand, a Grow Hero scan scores each one out of 100 and tells you, in order, exactly what to fix first. Either way, the businesses that treat these as a checklist, not a mystery, are the ones AI will be naming a year from now.