AI search optimisation for small businesses
By Mustafa Haroon · Foldscapes, a web design studio in Halifax, West Yorkshire
AI search optimisation makes your website legible to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot, so that when someone asks one of them a question your business answers, you are the business it names. Foldscapes does this work for small businesses in Halifax, West Yorkshire and across the United Kingdom — as a standalone job on a site you already have, or as part of a new build.
5.0 on GoogleWhy most small businesses are invisible to AI
A growing share of people no longer type a search and scan ten blue links. They ask an assistant, get one answer naming two or three businesses, and contact one of them. If your site is not readable by those systems, you are not in that answer — and unlike a poor search ranking, there is no page two to be found on.
The causes are almost always mundane rather than mysterious:
- AI crawlers are blocked — very often by a CDN bot setting the owner does not know is switched on, rather than by robots.txt.
- There is no structured data, so nothing states what the business is, where it is, or who runs it in a form a machine can rely on.
- The text only exists after JavaScript runs, so a crawler that does not render sees an empty page.
- The copy is marketing language. “Passionate about delivering excellence” contains no fact worth quoting, so nothing gets quoted.
What the work involves
Structured data that describes your business properly
Schema.org markup identifying who you are, where you are, what you do and who runs it, with stable identifiers so every page reinforces one entity rather than making the same claim separately. This is the difference between a machine knowing your business exists and knowing what it is.
Entity disambiguation
If your business name is shared with a product, a bigger company or a place, assistants will resolve it to the wrong one. That is a fixable problem, and it is fixed with a combination of structured data, explicit wording on the page and consistent profiles elsewhere.
Crawler access, checked end to end
GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot and Google-Extended named in robots.txt — and, just as important, a check that your CDN is not blocking them anyway. Cloudflare's bot protection will quietly refuse AI crawlers regardless of what robots.txt says.
An llms.txt summary
A short plain-text file at your site root describing the business in a few hundred words. Assistants parse it far more reliably than a page full of animation, and it is the cheapest way to control how you are described.
Content restructured to be quotable
Answer-first openings, real questions with direct answers, semantic lists and tables instead of styled divs, and a clean heading hierarchy. Assistants quote self-contained factual passages; most marketing copy is neither.
Honest dates and honest claims
Real last-modified dates from actual edits rather than a build timestamp, and no fabricated review markup. Self-serving review structured data is against Google's guidelines and carries a manual-action risk.
Who it is for
Small businesses whose customers ask questions before they buy — clinics, salons, trades, shops, and agencies, holiday lets and serviced accommodation, estate and letting agents. It is most worth doing when your service is one people research (“best estate agent in Halifax”, “holiday cottage near Hebden Bridge”) rather than one they stumble into, and when your business name is shared with something else, which quietly redirects every mention of you to somebody else’s product.
Websites from £2005.0 on Google
Live sites for Gris Estates, Happy Homes Estates, Mina's Tavern
Halifax-based · Brighouse, Elland, Sowerby Bridge and the rest of the UK
Common questions
- What is AI search optimisation?
- It is the work of making a website legible to AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot — so that when someone asks them a question your business answers, you are the business they name. It overlaps with SEO but is not the same job: search engines rank pages, assistants quote passages.
- Why is my business invisible to ChatGPT?
- Usually one of four reasons: the AI crawlers are blocked, often by a CDN setting rather than robots.txt; there is no structured data saying what the business is; the pages are built so the text only appears after JavaScript runs; or the copy is marketing language with no self-contained factual passage worth quoting.
- Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend my business?
- No, and be wary of anyone who says otherwise. Nobody controls what a model says. What can be controlled is whether your site is reachable, whether it states clearly what you do and where, and whether it contains passages worth citing. That is the work; the outcome follows from it but is not promised.
- Is this different from normal SEO?
- It shares foundations — crawlability, structured data, clear headings — but the goals differ. SEO competes for a ranked position on a results page. AI search competes to be the source an assistant paraphrases, which rewards specificity, factual density and self-contained answers over keywords and link volume.
- How would I know if it worked?
- Ask the assistants directly, before and after: your business name, your service plus your town, and the question a customer would actually type. Google Search Console shows AI Overview impressions, and server logs show whether GPTBot and PerplexityBot are fetching your pages at all — which is often the first thing that changes.
- Do you do this for businesses outside Halifax?
- Yes. The work is entirely remote — it happens in your site's code and configuration, not in a meeting room. Local businesses in Halifax and across West Yorkshire are welcome to meet in person, but it makes no difference to the result.
- What does a website from Foldscapes cost?
- Websites start at £200 for a single-page build, and a typical small-business site comes to around £500. Every job is quoted as one fixed price agreed before anything starts — no hourly billing and no invoices you weren't expecting. What moves the figure is how many pages you need and whether booking, payments or photography are part of it.
- Who actually does the work?
- Mustafa Haroon, and only Mustafa Haroon. Foldscapes is a one-person studio, so the person who answers the phone is the person who builds the site. There is no account manager in between, no work passed to a subcontractor, and no agency markup on top.
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