The assistants name a competitor instead of you
Your customers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI results for recommendations. Somebody gets named. Whether it can be you comes down to a handful of unglamorous, checkable things about how your site presents itself to a machine. Most Irish small-business sites fail at least one of them.
The question Irish businesses started asking in 2026. The uncomfortable answer is usually not that the assistant dislikes you. It is that your site never gave it anything solid to work with, and your competitor's did.
Five things you can check today
None of these guarantee an assistant names you. All of them are necessary first, and each one is a yes-or-no fact about your site rather than a matter of opinion.
Can machines read your site at all?
The first file any assistant reads is a short instruction file on your site (robots.txt). A leftover "block everything" line from when the site was built makes everything else irrelevant, and it is far more common than anyone expects on rebuilt sites.
Is a leftover setting hiding you?
There is a checkbox web people tick during a build that tells Google to look away. It gets forgotten. A site can look perfect and be invisible for this one reason alone.
Do you say who you are, in the form machines read?
A few lines of structured facts naming the business, where it is, and what it does. Assistants lean on those facts harder than search engines do, because they must commit to one answer instead of listing ten links. A site without them is asking to be paraphrased or skipped.
Do you publish the new assistants file?
An emerging plain-text file (llms.txt) telling assistants what your site covers and which pages matter. Optional, uncommon, and therefore currently cheap to be early on.
Is the site quick and reachable?
Machines give slow sites less of their time. A site that keeps them waiting gets partially read, and partial reading is how a competitor ends up being the one with the complete answer.
We do not ask the assistants about you
There is a service going around that runs your business name through four AI assistants and reports what they said. We do not offer it, for two reasons. Assistants give different answers to the same question minute to minute, so a single run is closer to a horoscope than a measurement. And a report whose contents come out of an AI is a report we cannot stand behind, a rule we apply to our own product first.
What we measure instead is the groundwork that decides whether you are readable at all. Every item reproducible, evidenced, and fixable. It is a smaller claim, and it survives being checked.
Take the checklist instead, free
All 40 faults the report looks for, each with what it means and what to do about it, ordered by what costs you most. Sent immediately, automatically. One email, not a sequence.