Why AI assistants don't recommend your startup (and what to do about it)

Assistants recommend what they can find and verify across several places. A product that exists only on its own website has one voice. A product that also appears in directories, reviews, comparison articles and community threads has many, and that is what gets repeated in an answer.

This is the most common reason and the one that takes longest to fix, because it depends on other people's pages.

If your homepage says 'the platform for modern teams', an assistant can't tell what question you answer. Say plainly what you are and who you are for, in the first screen, in the same words buyers use: '[Brand] is a [category] for [audience]'.

Some sites block AI crawlers in robots.txt, hide their copy behind JavaScript, or sit behind bot-protection that returns an error page. If the crawler can't read you, nothing you write helps.

• Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and check that you aren't disallowing GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended by accident.
• View the page source. If your main copy isn't in the HTML, render it on the server.
• Add an llms.txt with a short, factual description and links to your key pages.

Buyers ask 'X vs Y' and 'alternatives to Y'. If nobody has written a fair comparison that includes you, you're absent from the questions where intent is highest. Write an honest comparison page yourself, then look for third-party lists that should include you.

Do these in order. The first week is within your control; the rest compounds.

• Week 1: fix what's yours. Clear one-sentence positioning, crawlers allowed, llms.txt, structured data, an honest comparison page.
• Week 2: claim every relevant directory and review profile and fill in every field in your buyers' own words.
• Week 3: ask five happy customers for an honest review on the sites assistants cite for your category. Answer real questions in the communities where your buyers ask.
• Week 4: pitch the authors of 'best tools for X' lists with a short, specific reason to include you. Then re-check and compare against your baseline.

Engines that search the live web can react within days to weeks of a new listing or article. Memory-based recall changes slowly, over months. Nobody can promise a position, and anyone who does is selling something. What you can control is whether the evidence is there to be found.