How AI Assistants Choose Which Businesses to Recommend

AI assistants recommend a business when they can find it, read it and trust what they read, usually through a web search run in the background. The engines document how their crawlers work, but none publishes how it ranks businesses.

AI recommendations come from two things: whether an engine's crawlers can read your pages, and whether what they read answers the buyer's question better than the alternatives.

• Assistants answer either from what the model already knows or by searching the web and quoting what they find.
• Each engine runs separate crawlers for search, for user requests and for model training.
• Access is documented; the ranking recipe is not.
• You influence access, clarity and proof. You do not control the engine.

Where do the businesses in an AI answer come from?

An assistant can answer from what its model learned in training, or it can search the web and write its answer from the pages it finds. Search-based answers are the ones you can influence quickly, because they depend on pages that exist today. OpenAI describes this split in its crawler documentation: one crawler for search features, one for user-initiated page visits, and one for training (OpenAI).

What do the engines actually document?

• OpenAI: OAI-SearchBot is "used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features"; ChatGPT-User visits a page when a user asks ChatGPT or a custom GPT a question; GPTBot "is used to crawl content that may be used in training". OpenAI notes that robots.txt may not apply to ChatGPT-User because users initiate those visits (OpenAI).
• Perplexity: PerplexityBot is for surfacing and linking websites in Perplexity search results and "not used to crawl content for AI foundation models". Perplexity-User supports user requests and "generally ignores robots.txt rules" because a person asked for the page (Perplexity).
• Anthropic: ClaudeBot collects web content that could contribute to model training; Claude-SearchBot improves search result quality; Claude-User supports user-initiated requests (Anthropic).
• Google: a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, with no additional technical requirements (Google). The Google-Extended token controls use of crawled content for training future Gemini models and for grounding; it does not affect inclusion in Google Search or act as a ranking signal (Google).

What is not documented?

How an engine decides which of several readable businesses to name, and in what order. None of the sources above publishes a ranking formula, and we do not claim to know one. Treat any guide that gives you an exact recipe with suspicion, including the checklist in this one.

Why do the same questions give different answers?

Answers are generated each time and can differ between runs, between engines and between wordings of the same question. That is why a single screenshot proves little and why we aggregate across many questions and repeat weekly. When you test by hand, ask each question several times and in your customers' own language and city.

What can a small business actually influence?

Three things, in this order:

1. Access. If a search crawler is blocked, you cannot be cited from your own pages. Check it with the AI crawler checker.
2. Clarity. Put a plain, quotable answer in the first two sentences of each important page, and describe your business with structured data. The AI-readiness audit shows what is missing.
3. Proof. Keep your name, address and phone consistent, and be listed and reviewed on the sites buyers in your market use. This part is our working approach, not a published rule.

What should you do this month?

1. Run the AI crawler checker and fix any blocked search crawler. Read the crawler guide first if unsure.
2. Publish an llms.txt generated from your key pages.
3. Write five FAQ answers for the questions in your market, each starting with the answer.
4. Complete your profiles on the directories of your market.
5. Run the free AI Visibility Check and note who is named instead of you.