AI tools are becoming a new starting point for how people find businesses. Instead of scrolling through search results, customers increasingly ask systems like ChatGPT or Gemini for recommendations. Those systems then decide which businesses to surface. This guide explains how to make sure your website can be understood clearly by those systems. The goal is not to game an algorithm, but to reduce ambiguity so your business is represented accurately.

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If your website is already written for humans, that is a strong foundation. The missing piece is recognising that AI systems do not read websites the way people do. They parse them.

How AI systems see your website

When a person visits your site, they infer meaning from context, layout and familiarity. AI systems do not do that. They look for signals they can reliably extract. Without guidance, an AI might struggle to answer basic questions such as:

• What type of business is this?
• Where does it operate?
• When is it open?
• What services does it offer?

If the information is buried in paragraphs or implied rather than stated, the system may guess or skip you entirely. This is where structured data becomes useful.

What structured data actually is

Structured data is a small block of code added to your website that labels important information explicitly. It does not change how your site looks to visitors. It exists to help machines interpret your content correctly. For example, without structured data, an AI might read:

• “We offer morning yoga and pottery classes”

That sentence makes sense to a person, but it is ambiguous to a machine. With structured data, the same information becomes clear:

• Business type: Yoga and Pottery studio
• Location: York
• Activities: Yoga and Pottery
• Opening hours: 8am–4pm

You are no longer asking the system to infer meaning. You are telling it directly. A useful way to think about structured data is as labels, not decoration. It reduces the risk of misunderstanding.

Why does it matter

As AI systems begin pulling information directly from the web to generate answers, clarity becomes more important than ranking position. Structured data helps because it:

• Improves the chance your business appears in AI-generated answers
• Enables rich results such as star ratings, booking links and event dates
• Reduces the risk of incorrect details being shown
• Keeps your information consistent across platforms

If your opening hours change, updating the structured data at the same time as the page text ensures AI systems notice the update quickly. This is less about optimisation tricks and more about accuracy.

How to add structured data

You do not need to be technical to get started. If you manage your own site, Google provides a free tool that lets you select parts of a page and generates the required code for you. If you work with a developer or agency, ask them to add JSON-LD structured data, which is the recommended format and easy to maintain. After adding it, you can test whether it works using Google’s Rich Results testing tools. This confirms whether the data can be read correctly.

• Googles free tool lets you generates the code: Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper
• You can then use Google’s Rich Results Test to see of your changes have worked

Once added, structured data typically requires little maintenance beyond keeping it in sync with your site content.

Staying discoverable as search changes

You are no longer optimising only for traditional search engines. Large language models increasingly draw from live web data when forming answers. That means your website needs to be legible not just to crawlers, but to AI systems that summarise, compare and recommend businesses on a customer’s behalf. Clear structured data makes it easier for those systems to quote your information accurately. Simple, clear and trustworthy information is more likely to be quoted.