Can AI agents
read your business?

An AI agent is software that does a task for someone: finds an electrician who can come today, books a table for six, compares three quotes. Google describes agents as autonomous systems that can perform tasks on behalf of people. To do that for your business, an agent needs the same facts a customer needs, in a form it can read.

Four facts matter most: what it costs, when you're open, how to reach you, and how to book or buy. If one of them lives only in a photo, a PDF or a phone call, the agent has to guess, or move on to a business that made it easy.

None of this is new. It's the information a good website always had. What's changed is who's reading it.

The most common gap is a price list or menu uploaded as an image. A person can read it. A tool reading the page's text gets a file name and, with luck, the alt text. Google's image guidance calls alt text the most important attribute for describing an image, but alt text is a caption, not a price list.

PDFs are better, but not by much. Google can index PDF files, so a menu PDF may be found. But it's a separate document, often out of date, and an agent on your page has to open it to find a price. Put the main items and prices on the page itself and keep the PDF as the printable copy.

Phone-only booking is the same problem in another form. 'Call to book' works for people who will call. An agent working in a browser for someone usually can't. A simple online booking or request form removes the dead end.

Structured data is a short block of code that states your facts in a fixed format, using the shared vocabulary at schema.org. For a local business, Google requires a name and address, and recommends phone, url, opening hours and price range.

For online stores, Product markup with an Offer states each item's price and currency. Google's product structured data guide lists the properties it reads.

Two rules keep it honest. Use the most specific type that fits, such as Plumber, Dentist or Restaurant. And make sure every fact in the markup is also on the page: Google's guidelines say not to mark up content that isn't visible to readers. The checker compares the phone number in your markup with the one on the page for exactly this reason.

Structured data isn't a back door into AI answers. Google says it isn't required for its generative AI features. It's a way to state facts without ambiguity, which helps every tool that reads them.

robots.txt is a small public file that tells crawlers which parts of a site they may visit. It's a request, not a lock. Two crawlers matter most for being found: Googlebot, which feeds Google Search and its AI features, and OAI-SearchBot, which surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features.

It's easy to block one by accident. A rule copied from a forum, or added by a security plugin, can shut out a crawler you wanted. If you fix it, OpenAI says it can take about 24 hours for its search to catch up.

Two other entries are choices, not mistakes. GPTBot collects content that may be used to train OpenAI's models. Google-Extended controls use of your content for Google's AI training and grounding, and Google says it doesn't affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search. Allow them or not: it's a business decision, and the checker reports them without scoring them.

ChatGPT-User, which visits a page when someone asks ChatGPT a question, is different again. OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to it, because a person started the visit.

Fix in this order: anything that blocks a crawler, then facts missing from the text, then structured data. A blocked crawler hides everything. A missing price only hides the price.

Then ask the tools themselves. The AI visibility check tests whether ChatGPT and Perplexity name you, and Google's guide points to reporting in Search Console for its own AI features.

Keep the facts the same everywhere. Your hours on the site, your Google Business Profile and your Facebook Page should match. Google says Business Profiles can help businesses be visible in AI responses, and three different sets of hours give a tool three reasons to doubt you.