Is your website readable by AI? Structured data, plain text and llms.txt explained

People are asking AI who to call

In BrightLocal's 2026 survey, 45% of consumers said they use ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier. (BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 1,002 US consumers)

Those tools build their answers from what's published online, including your website. Each one works differently, and none publishes exactly how it chooses, but they all need to be able to read and understand your site.

Start with plain text

The most common problem isn't technical. It's information that only exists as a picture.

• Services in words. If your services are listed in a graphic or a photo of your van, software may not read them. List them as text.
• Towns in words. Name the towns you serve in a sentence, not only on a map image.
• Contact details in text. Your phone number, address and hours should be text, and match your Google Business Profile exactly.
• A page per main service. "Furnace repair in Grimsby and Lincoln" on its own page is far easier to understand than one long page listing everything.

Structured data

Structured data is a small block of code, in a format called schema.org, that states facts about your business in a way machines read directly: your name, business type, address, phone, hours, service area and website.

Search engines use structured data to understand pages and, in some cases, to show richer results. It doesn't guarantee better rankings or a mention by an AI tool, but it removes guesswork about the basics. For a local business, the type to use is LocalBusiness, or a more specific type such as Plumber or HVACBusiness.

Google's free Rich Results Test shows whether a page has structured data and whether it's valid.

What llms.txt is

llms.txt is a proposed standard, first suggested in 2024: a plain-text file at the root of your website that gives AI tools a short, clean summary of who you are, what you offer and where to find the important pages.

Be realistic about it. It's a proposal, not an official standard, and AI tools don't all read it. But it takes little effort, does no harm, and is a tidy summary of your business that's useful in its own right.

Consistency beats tricks

AI tools are more confident about a business when every source agrees. If your website says one phone number, your Google profile another and an old directory a third, you create doubt. Check that:

• your name, address and phone match everywhere;
• your services and service area are described the same way on your site and your profile;
• old or duplicate listings are cleaned up (see duplicate business listings).

What to skip

Be wary of anyone promising to get you recommended by AI. Nobody controls those answers. Hidden text, keyword stuffing and pages written for machines rather than people can backfire with search engines, and they don't help customers either.

The things that help are the same things that help people: clear pages, accurate details and recent reviews. Our guide to local search and AI covers the rest.

This article is general information for business owners, not legal advice. Survey figures are US consumer research where noted; we are not aware of equivalent published Canadian surveys and do not present them as Canadian data.