Will AI Recommend Your Business? Here's How to Check

Think about the last time you needed to find a service — a plumber, a coach, a local shop. A few years ago, you'd Google it and scroll through a list of links.

Increasingly, people are skipping that step entirely: they ask ChatGPT, or they use Google's new AI search, and they get a direct answer — "here are three good options" — with no scrolling at all.

That's a real shift, not a trend piece. AI-driven traffic to business websites grew 393% year-over-year in early 2026, according to Adobe's analytics data. Whatever that number looks like a year from now, the direction is clear: a growing share of your future customers won't find you by clicking a traditional search result. They'll find you because an AI tool recommended you — or they won't find you at all, because it recommended someone else.

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Here's the Uncomfortable Part

AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI search don't "know" your business the way a person does. They can only recommend what they can clearly read and understand from your website.

If your site is hard for these tools to make sense of — even if it looks perfectly normal to a human visitor — you can be quietly left out of these recommendations while a competitor with a clearer, simpler site gets mentioned instead.

The frustrating part is that this has nothing to do with how good your business actually is. It's purely about whether your website hands AI tools a clear, honest summary of what you do — or makes them guess.

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A 30-Second Way to Check Your Own Site

You can actually check this yourself, right now, without any technical knowledge:

1. Open a new browser tab.
2. Type in your website address, followed by /llms.txt — for example, yourbusiness.com/llms.txt.
3. Press enter.

Or just paste your URL below and I'll check it for you instantly:

If you see a green check above — good, you have the file AI tools look for.

If you see a red alert — that means AI tools currently have to guess what your business does by piecing together your navigation menu, your images, and your marketing copy. Some do a decent job of that. Many don't, especially if your site leans on complex visual builders over structured plain text.

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Why This One Small Thing Matters So Much

There's now an actual, official signal for this. Google added a score to its website-checking suite (PageSpeed Insights) in mid-2026 called "Agentic Browsing" — essentially, a grade for how easy your site is for AI tools to read and act on. One of the three things it checks for directly is the exact file you just tested above.

Google isn't alone in caring about this. Every AI tool that answers "recommend me a good X" is doing the same basic thing behind the scenes: trying to read your site quickly and pull out a trustworthy summary. A missing or messy version of that summary is one of the simplest reasons a genuinely great business gets skipped over in favor of a website that just made it easier for the AI to say something confident.

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The Fix Is Small — Smaller Than Most Website Problems

This isn't a redesign, a rebuild, or anything that touches how your site looks to human visitors. It's a short, separate text file that sits quietly on your website and gives AI tools a clear, accurate one-page summary: what you do, who you serve, your key pages, and how to contact or book you.

Nothing about your actual site changes — you're just handing AI tools a cheat sheet instead of making them guess.

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[!IMPORTANT] Have you checked if your website has an llms.txt file yet?

Try testing your website URL with /llms.txt in a new tab. Did it load a plain text summary or a 404 error? Share what you found in the comments below!

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Want to Dive Deeper into the Code?

If you'd like to understand exactly what this file contains under the hood, how AI crawlers parse it, or how to set it up yourself, read my full technical walkthrough: What Is llms.txt? Why It Matters, and How to Set One Up.