The LLM Visibility Checklist for Business Websites

When someone asks an AI assistant about your category, your company either comes up or it doesn't. Nobody outside the labs can tell you precisely why. The selection process isn't inspectable, and the honest state of the art is a set of observed correlations, not a mechanism.

What we can say is that the practices below are low-risk, cheap, and overlap almost entirely with things that were already good ideas. They make your business easier to identify, easier to verify, and easier to quote. If any of that influences whether a model names you, these are the levers. If it doesn't, you've still cleaned up your site.

Work through them in order. The early ones matter more.

1. Entity consistency

A model has to figure out that all the scattered references to your company are the same company. Inconsistency makes that harder and dilutes whatever signal exists.

• Pick one canonical company name and use it everywhere: your site, your social profiles, your directory listings, your press releases, your boilerplate. Decide about "Inc.", "Ltd.", the ampersand, and the capitalization, then never vary it.
• Fix mismatches across third-party listings. Crunchbase, LinkedIn, G2, industry directories, your local business listing. Different founding years and different descriptions across these sources is the most common mess we see.
• One canonical description. Write a 25-word statement of what you do, and use that exact text as your boilerplate everywhere. Repetition across sources is what makes a fact look settled.
• Disambiguate if your name is common. If you share a name with a band, a word, or a larger company, always pair the name with your category in the same sentence.

2. Structured, findable facts

Models and the retrieval systems feeding them need facts stated plainly, in one place, in text.

• Build an about page that states the facts directly: what the company does, when it was founded, where it's located, who runs it, who it serves, how it makes money. Facts, not a mission narrative.
• Publish pricing in text on a page. If pricing is behind a "contact us," the number simply does not exist to any system reading your site. A page like our pricing is readable in a way a sales call isn't.
• Give each product and use case its own page. One page trying to cover everything is harder to retrieve for a specific question than five focused pages.
• Answer real questions with real headings. If buyers ask "how long does implementation take," have a heading that says that and an answer directly underneath it.
• Put facts in body text, not images, PDFs, or JavaScript-rendered widgets. A number inside a graphic is invisible.
• Date your content and keep it current. Stale claims get repeated back to you for years.

3. Third-party corroboration

This is the one most companies skip and probably the one that matters most. A claim on your own site is an assertion. The same claim on an independent site is evidence, and systems trained on the whole web have a strong structural reason to weight the second more heavily.

• Get listed in the review and directory sites your category uses. Complete the profiles fully, because the structured fields there are exactly the kind of clean data that gets absorbed.
• Make sure your news exists somewhere other than your blog. Funding, launches, partnerships, hires. Wire distribution puts a dated, third-party record of your announcements into circulation, which is a different kind of artifact from a post on your own domain.
• Pursue coverage and bylines in trade publications. A piece written by or about you on an outlet with an independent reputation is the strongest corroboration available.
• Encourage inclusion in comparison and roundup articles. Citation monitoring consistently shows these being cited heavily for "best X for Y" questions, because they're structurally the right shape for the query.
• Check that third-party facts about you are correct. A wrong founding year on a widely-copied directory page propagates.

4. Schema and technical hygiene

Structured data doesn't feed models directly in most cases, but it removes ambiguity for the search and retrieval layers many assistants sit on top of.

• Organization schema on your homepage: legal name, URL, logo, founding date, social profiles, contact point.
• Product or Service schema on relevant pages, with offers and pricing where applicable.
• FAQPage schema where you genuinely have questions and answers.
• Article schema on blog content, with author and dates.
• Author information that resolves to a real person with a bio page. Unattributed content is harder to weight.
• Let crawlers in. Check your robots.txt and any bot-blocking at the CDN layer. Some companies have blocked AI crawlers deliberately, which is a legitimate choice. Just make sure it was a choice and not an accident from a default security setting.
• Server-render your important content. If the facts only appear after client-side JavaScript runs, assume some systems won't see them.
• Keep a clean sitemap and make sure pages are actually indexed.

5. Be quotable

Assistants generate answers by assembling information. Writing that's easy to lift gets lifted.

• Answer the question in the first sentence under the heading, then elaborate. Long preambles get skipped.
• Use specific numbers with sources. "Distribution costs $99 to $8,000 depending on network tier" is quotable. "Costs vary widely" is not.
• Write self-contained paragraphs. A paragraph that only makes sense after reading three previous ones can't be extracted.
• Use descriptive headings that match how people ask. Questions as headings work well.
• Include definitions. A clean one-sentence definition of a term in your category is disproportionately likely to be reused.
• Cut the marketing adjectives. "Industry-leading" carries no information, so a model has nothing to do with it. Concrete claims survive summarization. Superlatives get dropped.
• Show your work. Comparison tables in text, real tradeoffs, honest limitations. Writing that acknowledges when something isn't the right fit reads as more reliable to people, and apparently to the systems that summarize it too.

What to do this quarter

If you do nothing else, do these five, in this order:

1. Audit your name and description across every third-party listing you can find. Make them identical. One afternoon.
2. Rewrite your about page as a facts page and publish pricing in text.
3. Add Organization schema and verify your site renders content server-side.
4. Put one real announcement into third-party circulation. Make it something that genuinely qualifies, which this test will tell you.
5. Run ten category questions through the major assistants yourself, save the answers, and note every factual error about your company. Repeat next quarter.

That last step is the measurement loop, and doing it manually is fine at small scale. The fuller method is in our guide to tracking brand mentions in AI.

The caveat that belongs at the end

None of this is a guarantee. The systems change, the retrieval layers change, and the relationship between any single action and whether you get named in an answer is not something anyone can currently demonstrate cleanly. Be suspicious of anyone selling AI citation placement as a deliverable.

What's defensible is this: consistent identity, verifiable facts, independent corroboration, and clear writing are the conditions under which a system could find and trust you. Creating those conditions is within your control. What a model does with them isn't.

Getting your news into independent circulation is the part you can act on, so [see how it works](/how-it-works).