AI visibility for SMEs: what you need to do now, before your competitors do

Imagine a potential customer types into ChatGPT: "Which tax advisor in Hamburg is good?" The AI answers with a list. Your name isn't on it — even though you've been in the industry for ten years and have excellent reviews.

That's no accident. It's a technical problem. And it can be solved.

Why ChatGPT doesn't (yet) know you

AI models like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity work fundamentally differently than Google. Google crawls your site and rates it by backlinks, load time and keywords. AI models, by contrast, need structured, machine-readable facts — and those are missing on most company websites.

What AI looks for:

• Clear facts about your company (name, address, services, owner)
• Structured data formats such as JSON-LD schemas
• Explicit files like llms.txt and AGENTS.md that deliver facts in a compressed form
• Short, citation-ready texts that can be adopted directly as an AI answer

When these building blocks are missing, your company stays invisible to AI models — or worse: the AI invents information about you that isn't true.

We experienced this ourselves

Before we developed the AEO Asset Kit, we tested our own website. The result: 0 out of 100 test queries led to a correct mention of us. In 7 cases ChatGPT confused us with a state authority in NRW.

Four weeks after the optimisation: 74 out of 100 queries produced a correct mention — with full name, location and service focus.

"Tina Janscheidt is a sole proprietorship based in Hamburg, specialising in AI visibility and digital marketing for SMEs."
— ChatGPT 5, after AEO optimisation

The 3 most common mistakes on German SME websites

1. No machine-readable company data

Most company websites have their information in "human-readable" HTML format: nicely designed, but hard for AI models to process. JSON-LD schemas help — invisible data blocks in the source code that contain exactly what an AI needs.

2. AI bots are blocked

Many websites accidentally block, via the robots.txt file, exactly the bots responsible for AI visibility. On many websites GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot simply aren't allowed to crawl.

3. No clear associations

Is your company's name similar to that of an authority, an association or a well-known company? Then the AI may categorise you incorrectly. Without a clear digital identity, you're background noise to AI models.

What you can do today

You don't have to be a developer to take the first steps:

1. Check robots.txt: Open your-domain.com/robots.txt and see whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot are blocked.
2. Do an AI test: Ask ChatGPT: "Who is [your company name]?" and "Which [your profession] in [your city] do you recommend?" — what comes back?
3. Document the starting point: A screenshot of today's AI answers. That's your before document.

If you want to know more about what the AI says about your company today — and what can be changed — start with the free quick test.

Why act now?

AI visibility today is exactly where SEO was in 2005: at the beginning. Most competitors have done nothing yet. Whoever creates the foundations now builds a lead that latecomers can only catch up with much more effort.

The question isn't whether AI search will become important — it already is. The only question is whether your company is part of it or not.

Tina Janscheidt

Owner · Digital marketing with an AI focus · Hamburg
Specialising in AI visibility (AEO & GEO) for SMEs.