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How to get your website found by Google and AI

October 8, 2026·8 min read

Someone types the exact thing you sell into Google. Someone else asks ChatGPT who does it near them. Your site is in neither answer, and a competitor gets the customer.

That is rarely a mystery, and it is almost never about how good your website looks. It comes down to a short chain of checks that either pass or fail, most of them settings and files you can look at this afternoon. Here is the whole chain in the order it has to happen, and an honest note on which parts are a ten-minute fix and which take months.

The five steps in the order they have to happenFive rising steps: let them in, put it in the HTML, say what it is, be worth quoting, get named elsewhere. The first three are files and settings; the last two take time.1Let them inrobots.txt2Put it inthe HTML3Say whateach page is4Be worthquoting5Get namedelsewhereFiles and settingsTodayTodayWeeksMonths
Five steps, and the order is the point

Two questions decide all of it

Google and AI answer engines arrive at your site asking the same two things. Can I read this? And can I tell what it is?

Every step below sits under one of those. If a crawler, the program that fetches pages for a search engine or an AI, cannot get in, nothing else you do counts. If it gets in and cannot work out what your business is, it moves on to a page that says so plainly.

The steps are in order for a reason. Work on step four while step one is broken and you will get nothing back for the effort.

Step 1: let them in

Your robots.txt is a plain text file sitting at the root of your site, and it lists who is allowed to crawl you. Your builder or an SEO plugin usually writes it for you, which is exactly how sites end up blocking things nobody chose to block.

One distinction is worth learning, because it decides whether you appear in AI answers at all. Some AI crawlers collect pages to train models. Others fetch pages live, right at the moment someone asks a question, and cite the source in the reply. Turning away the training crawlers is a fair call and costs you no citations. Turning away the citation ones, OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT and PerplexityBot for Perplexity, removes you from the answers completely.

While you are there, check for a noindex tag. That is a single line telling Google not to list a page at all. It goes on staging sites during a build and gets left behind after launch more often than anyone admits.

Step 2: check it is in the HTML, not the JavaScript

HTML is the plain text version of your page, the thing your server hands over before anything runs. JavaScript is code that runs afterwards, inside the visitor's browser, and changes what appears on screen.

Google runs JavaScript before deciding what your page says. Most AI crawlers do not. So a title, a description or a block of structured data that gets added by a script exists for your human visitors and not for the machine reading you.

If your site is on Wix, Squarespace, WordPress or Shopify, this is handled for you and you can move on. It bites custom-built sites and single-page apps, where the whole page is drawn by code after loading.

Step 3: make every page say what it is

This is the step most sites fail, and it is the cheapest one to fix. Four things do the work.

  • The title tag, the line that shows as the clickable heading in a search result. Aim for 30 to 60 characters and make it specific. The classic no-code failure is every single page carrying the home page's title, so twenty pages all announce themselves as the same thing.
  • The meta description, the grey summary underneath. Around 70 to 160 characters. It does not move your ranking, but it decides whether anyone clicks, and AI engines lean on it to summarise what a page covers.
  • Structured data, usually written as JSON-LD. A small block of code that states your facts in a format a machine reads without guessing: what kind of business you are, where, what you sell, your opening hours. Roughly nine out of ten sites skip it, and most of the pages winning the top Google results have it.
  • A canonical tag, the line naming the real address of a page when the same content is reachable from several URLs. A wrong one is worse than none, because a canonical pointing somewhere broken tells Google the good copy lives somewhere it cannot reach.

Step 4: write something worth quoting

AI engines do not quote pages, they quote passages. They lift a few sentences that answer the question on their own and credit the site those sentences came from. So a brilliant answer buried in paragraph nine, under a warm-up about your journey, gets skipped for a worse answer sitting at the top of somebody else's page.

Put the answer first, in plain sentences, and let the detail follow. Give sections real headings that match the question a person would ask. Keep a page of straight questions and straight answers, because that format is close to what an engine is already looking for.

Freshness counts too. Answer engines lean towards recent pages, and something last touched three years ago quietly stops being cited. That does not mean rewriting your site every month. Updating your handful of important pages when the facts change is enough.

Step 5: get named somewhere that is not your site

Everything so far you control. This part you do not, and it is the reason a technically perfect small site still loses to a mediocre well-known one.

Links from other sites are still one of the strongest trust signals Google has. For AI citations, plain mentions seem to count as well, even when nobody links: your name turning up in a roundup, a forum answer, a local paper, a supplier's page. Around seven in ten pages that AI engines cite already rank on Google, so authority earned the slow way keeps paying out on both sides.

There is no file that fixes this and no honest shortcut. Real customers, real coverage, real partners, over months. Which is exactly why it belongs at step five and not step one.

Where to start tomorrow

Most people start at the bottom of that list, chasing links and rewriting copy while a stray noindex tag or a blocked crawler holds the whole thing shut. Start at the top instead.

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in your browser and read it. It takes a minute, it is the step that gates everything else, and if it turns out fine you have ruled out the worst case for free. Then work down: HTML, then titles, then content, then the slow work of getting named elsewhere.

Find out which step you are stuck on

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