Somebody searched for this recently and landed on our site: companies to help my website with ai search. It is a sensible question, asked at an awkward moment, because a whole category of service appeared in the space of about a year and the marketing has run comfortably ahead of the substance.
Some of the people selling this do genuinely good work. Others took their existing sales page, added a paragraph about ChatGPT, and raised the price.
Here is how to tell which one you are speaking to. Seven questions, and what a good answer sounds like.
In short: the work is real, but it is not a separate discipline. Most of it is accurate information everywhere, reviews with substance, mentions in places you do not own, and pages written to be quoted. Ask the seven questions below, and be particularly careful with anybody who guarantees a result or who cannot show you what an assistant says about you today.
First, what the work actually is
Before you can judge a provider, you need a rough idea of what competent work looks like. It is less exotic than the marketing suggests.
When somebody asks an assistant for a recommendation, it builds an answer from sources it can find and trust. For a local business that usually means map listings, review platforms, established directories, professional bodies, local publications and genuine discussion.
So the work is: making sure your information is accurate and identical everywhere, so you are easy to describe with confidence. Building reviews that contain useful sentences rather than only stars. Getting your business documented in a few independent places. And writing your own pages so that a passage can be lifted and used, with plain statements, real answers to real questions, and dates.
Notice how much of that overlaps with ordinary good local visibility work. That is not a coincidence, and it is the single most useful thing to understand before somebody quotes you for a separate product.
The seven questions
One: can you show me what an assistant says about my business right now?
This is the opening question and it filters heavily. Any provider genuinely working in this area will have asked already, or will do it in front of you in two minutes. If they cannot show you the current answer, they have not looked, and they are proposing to improve something they have never observed.
Two: which specific sources will you change, and how?
Good answers are concrete: your map listing, these four directories with wrong information, your professional body entry, your review flow, these six pages on your site that need rewriting so they can be quoted.
Weak answers describe activity without objects: optimising your content for AI discoverability, enhancing your entity signals. Ask again, more directly. If the second answer is also vague, you have your information.
Three: what will you do that is different from normal search work?
An honest provider will tell you that most of it is the same work done properly, with some particular emphasis on consistency across sources, on independent mentions, and on how pages are written.
A provider who claims it is an entirely separate discipline requiring their proprietary system is usually selling two invoices for one job.
Four: what can you actually guarantee?
The correct answer is: not placement. There is no slot to buy, no submission form, no ranking to promise. What can be promised is the work: the sources corrected, the pages written, the reviews process established, and measurement of whether the answers change.
Anybody guaranteeing that you will appear in AI recommendations is either mistaken about how these systems work or is relying on you not knowing. Walk away, politely.
Five: how will we measure it?
The honest method is a fixed set of questions, asked across several assistants, on a schedule, with the answers recorded and compared over time. Are you named. Is the description accurate. How do you compare with named competitors.
If they offer a single number as a score, ask exactly how it is calculated. Sometimes the answer is reasonable. Sometimes there is no answer.
Six: who does the work, and what will you need from me?
Good work in this area needs facts only you have: your real prices, your real service areas, your qualifications, the questions your customers actually ask. A provider who says they need nothing from you is planning to write generic material, which is precisely the material assistants ignore.
Seven: what do I own if I stop?
The same question you should ask of any provider. Your website, your pages, your Google account, your reviews, your directory entries. All of it should already be yours. If any part of it lives in their account, that is the deal breaker, not the price.
The promises that should worry you
A few specific claims to treat with suspicion.
"We will submit your business to the AI platforms." There is no submission process of that kind.
"We can get you into ChatGPT's training data." Not a service anybody can sell.
"Our proprietary AI visibility score." Ask how it is calculated. A score nobody will explain is a marketing device.
"You need this file on your website and then AI will find you." Some files of this kind are harmless and mildly useful housekeeping. None of them are a route to being recommended, and anybody presenting one as the answer has oversimplified the picture considerably. We looked at the evidence in is the llms.txt file worth it.
Guaranteed placement, of any kind. Covered above, and worth repeating.
What you should do before hiring anybody
Two things, and they cost nothing.
Run the check yourself. Open two or three assistants in fresh conversations and ask what a customer would ask. Who are the best businesses of your type in your town. Then ask about your business by name. Write down exactly what comes back. Our full method is in how to find out what AI says about your business.
Now you have a baseline, and any provider who tells you something different from what you saw with your own eyes has a problem.
Fix the free things. Complete your Google Business Profile. Make your details identical everywhere. Start asking every satisfied customer for a review, and encourage them to describe what you actually did. These are the foundations of the whole thing, and a provider who charges you for them is charging for an afternoon of your own time.
The honest summary
There is real work here and it does matter, because a growing share of buying decisions now pass through an assistant before anybody reaches your website.
But it is not magic, it is not a separate industry, and nobody can guarantee the outcome. The businesses being recommended are the ones with accurate information everywhere, reviews with substance, a presence in places they do not own, and pages that state facts plainly.
If you would like a starting picture of where you stand across both search engines and AI assistants, our free visibility check reports back in plain language and costs nothing. Use it as your baseline, ask the seven questions, and you will be a much harder person to sell to.