Writing
When Someone Asks AI About Your Business, What Does It Say?
August 20265 minSantam Kumai
Try something right now. Open ChatGPT, or Claude, or Perplexity, and ask it about your own business. Type your business name and ask what it does.
One of three things will happen. The AI will describe you accurately. It will describe you wrongly. Or it will have no idea you exist.
For most small businesses I’ve tested this with, it’s the third one. And that’s a bigger problem than it sounds, because the way people find businesses is quietly changing underneath us.
The shift nobody announced
For twenty years, being found online meant one thing: Google. You made a website, you hoped it ranked, maybe you paid for ads. The customer typed “homestay in Kalimpong,” got ten blue links, and clicked around.
That behaviour is fading. Increasingly, people ask instead of search. They type “I’m visiting Kalimpong for three days, where should I stay if I like quiet heritage places?” into an AI assistant, and it replies with two or three specific recommendations. In full sentences. With reasons.
Notice what happened there. There’s no page two. There’s no “ten blue links.” There are two or three names, chosen by a machine, and everyone else is invisible.
The question every business owner should be asking is: how does the machine choose?
How AI actually “reads” your business
AI assistants learn about businesses the same way a very fast, very literal reader would: by reading what’s publicly written about you. Your website, mostly. Directories and reviews too, but your website is the source you control.
Here’s the part most people miss: AI reads text, not beauty.
Your website might look stunning to a human. But if that beauty is built the wrong way, with the words baked into images, or appearing only after fancy loading effects, or the whole site one big animation with no actual written content, then to an AI reader your website is close to a blank page. I’ve seen gorgeous, expensive websites that describe themselves to machines as essentially nothing.
Meanwhile a plain, well-written site that clearly states “we are a family-run bed & breakfast in Kalimpong, near the market, pet-friendly, with mountain views” gets understood perfectly, and repeated back almost word for word when someone asks.
That’s the strange new rule of the internet: the AI can only say about you what it can read about you.
What “AI-readable” actually means
You don’t need to understand the technology to check whether your online presence passes. Here’s the honest checklist, translated from tech-speak:
1. Your website says what you do, in plain words.
Not “crafting experiences beyond the ordinary.” Say what you are, where you are, who you’re for, and what you offer. Poetry is fine, but somewhere on the page the facts must exist as plain sentences. Machines quote facts, not vibes.
2. The words are real text, not pictures of text.
If your menu, prices, or contact details only exist inside an image or a PDF poster, most AI readers can’t reliably use them. Real, selectable text wins.
3. The content exists before the animation.
Modern websites love effects: things fading in, sliding, reacting to scroll. Nothing wrong with that (my own site is full of them). But there’s a right way to build it: the content lives in the page from the start, and animation only changes how it appears, not whether it exists. Built the wrong way, the machine arrives, sees an empty page, and leaves.
4. There’s a structured summary behind the scenes.
Websites can carry a hidden, machine-friendly label: a small block of structured data that says “this is a business, here’s its name, location, type, and contact.” Humans never see it. Machines love it. It’s cheap to add and most sites skip it.
5. You’re not blocking the readers at the door.
Every website has a small file that tells automated visitors what they’re allowed to read. Some sites accidentally block AI crawlers entirely, usually because of a default setting nobody ever looked at. Being blocked means being absent from every answer.
6. What’s written about you is consistent.
If your website, your Google listing, and your social pages describe you three different ways, the machine gets confused, and confused machines either say something wrong or say nothing. Pick one clear description and use it everywhere.
“But my customers don’t use AI”
Some of them don’t. Yet. But this is the same conversation businesses had about websites in 2005 and about Google Maps in 2015. The people who moved early didn’t just keep up. They became the default answer while their competitors weren’t in the room.
And here’s the quiet advantage: because so few businesses have thought about this, the bar is on the floor. A clearly written, properly built website puts you ahead of companies ten times your size. In AI answers, a well-described homestay in Kalimpong can outrank a badly-described hotel chain. The machine doesn’t care about your marketing budget. It cares about whether it can understand you.
What I do about this
When I build a website, AI-readability isn’t an add-on. It’s the foundation. The plain-language descriptions, the structured data, the machine-friendly summaries, the crawler permissions, the way animations are wired so they never hide content: all of it goes in from day one. The site you’re reading this on is built exactly this way. Ask an AI about me and you’ll see the result.
If you’re curious what AI currently says about your business (or, worryingly, what it doesn’t), do the test at the top of this article. And if you don’t like the answer, that’s a fixable problem. It’s the kind of thing I fix.
— Santam Kumai builds websites and digital tools that both humans and machines understand. WhatsApp him; it’s really him replying.