How to optimise your website for both Google and AI

In a companion guide I wrote about why AI is changing how customers find you. A growing share of people now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google’s AI answers instead of scrolling a list of blue links. That guide was the “why”. This one is the “what to actually do”.

The reassuring bit first: there is no separate “AI version” of your website to build. The things that make a site easy for AI to understand and recommend are, almost entirely, the things that made it good for Google all along. You do the work once. Both worlds benefit. What follows is the checklist I actually run through for a small business, in roughly the order I’d tackle it.

The good news: Google and AI want the same thing

It’s tempting to imagine AI search as a strange new beast that needs feeding differently. It mostly isn’t. When AI assistants build an answer, they read the same web Google crawls, and they lean on the same signals: is this page clear, is it fast, is it trustworthy, does it plainly answer the question. A page that’s confusing to a person is confusing to a machine too.

So the mental model is simple. Google decides which pages to show. AI decides which pages to quote. Both are asking, underneath, “can I understand this well enough to stake my reputation on it?” Everything below is just different ways of making the answer yes.

You’re not optimising for a search engine or for a chatbot. You’re making your business impossible to misunderstand, and both happen to reward that.

First, the boring technical basics

None of the clever stuff matters if a machine can’t load or read your site in the first place. Get these right and most of the battle is won.

• Fast. If your pages take five seconds to load, people leave and crawlers lose patience. Compress your images, don’t load a dozen heavy plugins, and test on a phone on mobile data, not just your office broadband.
• Mobile-friendly. Most people will meet you on a phone, and Google judges your site by its mobile version. Text should be readable without pinching; buttons should be tappable without aiming.
• Crawlable. Machines need to be able to reach your pages. That means real text (not everything trapped inside images), sensible links between pages, and nothing accidentally blocking the bots.
• Clean structure. One clear heading per page, sensible sub-headings, short paragraphs. A page that’s well organised for a skim-reader is well organised for an AI pulling out an answer.

One modern gotcha worth flagging: some hosting and security setups now block AI crawlers by default. It’s worth checking you haven’t accidentally shut the door on the very tools you’re trying to be found in. If that sentence meant nothing to you, it’s exactly the kind of thing worth having someone check once.

Say plainly what you do

This is where most small-business sites lose the plot, and where the easiest wins live. Marketing waffle like “bespoke solutions tailored to your journey” is invisible to an AI. It can’t quote something that doesn’t say anything. Clear, specific, plain English is what gets picked up.

For every important page, make sure a stranger (or a machine) could answer, within seconds:

• What do you actually do? Name the service, not the vibe.
• Who is it for? “Sports injuries and post-surgery rehab”, not “your wellness”.
• Where do you do it? Your town, your area, your radius.
• How does someone start, and roughly what does it cost or involve?

Two habits make a page far more quotable. First, put the answer up front. Lead with the plain definition or the direct response, then explain. AI tends to lift the clear sentence near the top, not the one buried in paragraph nine. Second, write self-contained sections: each chunk should make sense on its own, because that’s often how a snippet gets pulled out and shown. If a paragraph only makes sense after reading the three before it, it’s harder to quote.

Structured data, without the jargon

Structured data (you’ll also hear “schema markup”) sounds technical, and the code is too. But the idea is simple. It’s a little block of hidden, standardised labelling that sits behind your page and tells Google and AI, in a format they can’t misread, exactly what your business is: the name, the address, the phone number, the opening hours, the services, the prices, the reviews.

Think of it as the difference between handing someone a paragraph about yourself and handing them a filled-in form. The paragraph, they have to interpret. The form, they can just read. Structured data is the form.

A couple of things that help here:

• Be specific about the type. Don’t just label yourself a generic “local business” if a more precise category fits: a “professional service”, a “dental practice”, a “restaurant”. The more precisely you’re categorised, the more confidently you can be recommended for the right query.
• Keep it truthful and matching. The details in your structured data should exactly match what’s visible on the page and everywhere else you appear. Machines cross-check. Contradictions cost you trust.

You don’t need to hand-write this from scratch, and you can check it works using Google’s free Rich Results Test. It’s fiddly to get right and easy to get subtly wrong, which is honestly one of the more worthwhile jobs to hand to someone who does it often.

Get your listings straight

Your website isn’t the only place you exist online. You’re on Google Business Profile, maybe a few directories, social pages, an old listing you forgot about. AI systems and Google build a picture of you by cross-referencing all of these, and if they disagree, you look untrustworthy.

The single highest-value habit here is NAP consistency: your Name, Address, and Phone number written identically everywhere they appear. And I do mean identically.

“Suite 4, 12 High St” in one place and “12 High Street, Unit 4” in another reads, to a machine, like two different businesses.

Small mismatches erode the confidence a system has in your details: “St.” versus “Street”, an old mobile number, a slightly different business name. An unsure system stays quiet rather than recommend you. So pick one exact format and make everything match it.

Then, if you serve a local area, claim and fully complete your Google Business Profile. It’s free, it feeds Google Maps and the local results directly, and it’s one of the most-referenced sources when AI answers “who should I use near me”. Fill in every field, add real photos, list your services and hours, and keep it current.

Reviews, and actually being good

There’s no clever trick that substitutes for being a business worth recommending. Both Google and AI lean heavily on signals of real substance, and reviews are the clearest one.

• Gather genuine reviews. A steady stream of honest reviews on your Google Business Profile does more for local trust than almost anything else. The best time to ask is right after you’ve done good work; most happy customers are glad to, they just need the nudge and the link.
• Get mentioned elsewhere. When an independent site mentions your business, say a local paper, a trade body, or a supplier’s directory, systems treat you as a more established, more real entity. You can’t fake this, which is exactly why it counts.
• Have real specifics. Actual prices, actual case studies, actual named services. AI is good at spotting thin, vague content, and good at rewarding the substantial kind.

Write the pages people are actually asking for

People ask AI questions in plain, natural language: “how much does X cost”, “is Y worth it for Z”, “what’s the difference between A and B”. If your site actually answers those questions, clearly, honestly, in a self-contained chunk, you become a candidate to be quoted.

You don’t need a content mill churning out a post a day. You need a handful of useful pages that answer the real questions your customers ask, written in language a human uses (not the language your industry uses internally). A clear FAQ, a straight “what this costs and why” page, an honest comparison. These punch well above their weight.

One honest caveat on the technical fringe: you’ll hear about llms.txt, a proposed file that spoon-feeds your key content to AI tools. It’s cheap to add and does no harm, but adoption is still early and the evidence it does much is thin. The vast majority of these files currently go unread by the bots. File it under “fine to include, don’t count on it”. The clear, well-structured pages underneath matter far more.

How to tell if it’s working

You don’t need a dashboard obsession, but you should be able to answer “is this doing anything?” A few honest ways to check:

• Google Search Console (free) shows what you’re appearing for and getting clicks on, and increasingly surfaces AI-related performance too. It’s the closest thing to ground truth.
• Ask the assistants yourself. Open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask the kind of question a customer would (“best [what you do] in [your town]”). See if you come up, and what it says about you. It’s crude, but revealing.
• Watch your enquiries. The number that actually matters isn’t rankings. It’s whether the right people are getting in touch. If enquiries improve, the plumbing is working, whatever the charts say.

And a closing dose of honesty: this isn’t a one-and-done job. Search shifts, AI tools change, and content that sat untouched for a year tends to fade from the answers. That doesn’t mean paying someone forever. It means the occasional tidy-up, a refresh of your key pages, a check that nothing’s broken. The businesses that win are rarely the ones doing something clever. They’re the ones doing the boring things properly, and then not letting them rot.

Common questions

Do I have to choose between optimising for Google and optimising for AI?

No. That’s the whole point of this guide. They reward almost identical things: a fast, clear, well-structured site that plainly states what you do and backs it up. Do the work once and you’re feeding both. There is no separate “AI version” of your website to build.

Do I need to pay for expensive tools to do this?

Mostly no. The important tools are free: Google Business Profile, Google Search Console, and Google’s Rich Results Test for checking your structured data. The real work is careful writing and getting your details consistent, and that costs time and attention, not a subscription.

How long before any of this makes a difference?

Some of it is quick. A corrected Google Business Profile or fixed structured data can be read within days. Rankings and AI mentions move more slowly, over weeks and months, as the systems re-crawl and rebuild trust. It’s also not a one-off: search and AI keep changing, so a good site needs the occasional tidy-up, not a single fix-and-forget.