Why doesn't my business show up in AI results?
An assistant has to be able to read you, work out who you are, and find a reason to name you. If it never names your business, one of those three has failed. And each is checkable for nothing.
Get my free reportIt cannot read your site.
AI crawlers are blocked more often by accident than by choice, a robots.txt rule, or a firewall rule nobody connected to this. A blocked crawler does not complain; it simply never returns. Both are checkable in seconds.
Check for a blockIt cannot tell who you are.
Engines assemble one company from repeated, identical statements. A business whose name, address and phone differ between its own pages and its listings, or that shares an address with a similarly named company, gets merged with something else. We have had exactly that happen to us, and it is why our own document number appears on every page of this site.
Check what AI says about youIt has nothing to cite.
Answers get assembled from sources. If nothing answers the buying question in your category plainly — not a brochure page, an actual answer — there is nothing for an assistant to quote, and it quotes whoever did write one.
What gets a business namedFind out which one it is.
BrightLocal found 40% of consumers now use generative AI when they search. The free report asks five buying questions, records every company that came back for each, and tells you whether yours was among them. It costs nothing and needs no call.
Get my free reportWhat people ask us.
Why doesn't my business show up in AI results?
Usually one of three things: an AI crawler cannot read your site, the engine cannot work out who you are because your details disagree between sources, or nothing you publish answers the buying question plainly enough to quote. Each is checkable free, and the free report tells you which applies.
Does being blocked to AI crawlers hurt my normal search ranking?
They are separate. A rule that blocks GPTBot or ClaudeBot does not affect Google's ordinary crawler, which is why this gets missed: the site ranks as usual while assistants never see it.
My business ranks well on Google. Why isn't it in the AI answer?
They are different competitions. Ranking places you in the list; the answer is printed above the list and is assembled from sources an engine chose to cite. Ahrefs analysed 300,000 keywords and found AI Overviews correlated with a 34.5% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page.
How do I check what an AI assistant says about my business?
Ask one directly what it knows about your company by name, and check the trade, the town and the address it gives back. A confident answer about the wrong business is worse than no answer at all.
How long does it take to fix?
A crawler block is minutes. Getting named in answers is weeks rather than days, and longer in a crowded category, because assistants read from indexes that refresh on their own schedule.