5 Things Your Website Needs Before AI Will Recommend You | AI Readiness Checklist

I was doing a website audit for a plasterer in Stevenage a few weeks back. Nice site. Clean design, professional photos, even had a little animation on the homepage. He'd paid about four grand for it.

I asked ChatGPT who to call for plastering in Stevenage.

Three names came up. He wasn't one of them.

Four grand. Invisible. The bloke looked like he wanted to chuck his laptop out the window. I get it. But his site was missing five specific things that AI needs before it'll stick its neck out and name your business. And until you've got all five sorted, you could have the prettiest website in Hertfordshire and it won't make a blind bit of difference.

Answer the questions people actually ask

OK so this is the one that frustrates me the most because it's free to fix and almost nobody does it.

AI tools exist to answer questions. That's it. That's the whole product. So when someone types "how much does plastering a ceiling cost in Stevenage?" into ChatGPT, the AI goes hunting for websites that have already answered that exact question clearly.

If your website has that question written out with a proper, detailed answer underneath? You're in the running. If your FAQ section is full of stuff like "Why choose our company?" and "What makes us different?"...

Nobody is typing that into ChatGPT. Ever.

I'm talking about the real questions. The ones your phone rings about. What does it cost. How long will it take. Do you cover my area. Can you do weekends. What qualifications do you have. What happens if something goes wrong.

That plasterer? We wrote out twelve proper FAQs for him. Not two-sentence throwaway rubbish, proper answers, a good paragraph each, with specifics about pricing ranges, timelines, the lot. He started showing up in ChatGPT results within about a month. For more on getting your FAQs right for AI, I wrote a separate piece on how to write FAQs that ChatGPT actually uses.

Be painfully specific about your services

"We provide a wide range of services to meet your needs."

Stop it.

That sentence is on about 80% of the trade websites I look at in North Hertfordshire and it tells the AI precisely nothing. The AI reads that, shrugs, and moves on to the next business that bothered to be clear.

Here's what specific looks like: "We install, repair and service combi, system and conventional boilers across Hitchin, Letchworth and Baldock. Most repairs completed same day. New installations typically take one to two days depending on the system."

See? The AI now knows what you do, where you do it, how long it takes, and what types of work you handle. It can match that against what someone's actually asking. Your vague marketing copy? It matches against nothing.

I had a gardener in Royston (bit of a tangent but it illustrates the point perfectly) who had one page that just said "Garden Services" with six bullet points underneath. We expanded it into three separate pages covering garden design, maintenance, and hard landscaping, each with specific descriptions of what's included, rough costs, and timelines.

His AI visibility went from zero to being recommended for garden design queries across the SG8 postcode within five weeks. Specificity is everything.

Name your towns or don't exist in them

This one gets people every time.

AI will not guess your service area. It can't. If someone in Baldock asks "who's a good painter near me?" and the word Baldock doesn't appear anywhere on your website, you simply do not exist for that query. You could've been painting houses in Baldock for twenty years. Doesn't matter. The AI doesn't know what's not written down.

Hitchin. Letchworth. Baldock. Royston. Stevenage. Knebworth. St Albans. Welwyn. Codicote. Every town and village you'll happily drive to for a job, it needs to be on your site. Homepage, service pages, about page, footer. Scatter them naturally throughout your content.

Yes, it feels repetitive when you're writing it. My wife would say I repeat myself anyway (she's not wrong). But repetition here isn't a problem. Absence is the problem.

One decorator I work with in Hitchin added every village within a fifteen mile radius to his site. We're talking Pirton, Ickleford, Holwell, Preston, the lot. Within three weeks he started picking up ChatGPT recommendations for decorating queries in places he'd never ranked for on Google. Villages that barely register in traditional search suddenly became a source of leads because he was the only decorator who'd bothered to mention them.

Prove you're actually any good

Would you recommend a stranger? Someone you know nothing about, with no track record, no reviews, no evidence they can do what they claim?

Neither will ChatGPT.

This is where case studies and testimonials earn their keep. And before you groan, they don't need to be elaborate. A case study can be three paragraphs: what the customer needed, what you did, how it turned out. Chuck in the town name and a photo if you've got one. Done.

Even one decent case study puts you miles ahead of the competition because (and I keep saying this to people) most local businesses have zero. Absolutely zero evidence on their website that they've ever done a job for anyone. The AI has nothing to work with, so it recommends someone who gave it something.

Testimonials matter too, but only the specific ones. "Great job, would recommend!" gives the AI nothing. "Replastered our entire downstairs in Letchworth, finished in three days, left everything spotless" gives it loads. The AI uses that detail to match you against specific queries. If you want to understand how to format case studies that AI actually picks up, have a look at how to format case studies for AI search.

Get your information consistent everywhere

Right. This one's boring. I know, I know. But it bloody matters.

Your business name, address, phone number, and description need to match everywhere you appear online. Your website, Google Business Profile, Yell, Checkatrade, Facebook, TrustATrader, wherever you've got a listing.

If your website says "J Smith Electrical" and Google says "John Smith Electrical Services" and Yell says "J.Smith Electrics Ltd", the AI gets confused. It can't tell if these are the same business or three different ones. And confused AI doesn't recommend anyone. It just picks someone else whose information is clean.

Fixing this takes an afternoon. Maybe less. It's tedious, yes. But it's one of the biggest AEO mistakes local businesses make and one of the simplest to sort out. Pour yourself a coffee, open every listing you can find, and make them all say the same thing.

So that's the five

None of this is expensive. None of it requires a developer or a marketing degree. It's just work that needs doing. And the reason it's such an opportunity right now is that most businesses in Hitchin, Stevenage, Letchworth, everywhere across North Hertfordshire, they haven't done it yet. They're still running websites built for a version of search that's rapidly disappearing.

If you want someone to look at your site and tell you exactly what's missing, get in touch. I'll audit it and we'll get your AEO sorted for North Hertfordshire so that when people ask AI for help, it's your name that comes up.