How to Show Up in AI Search Results

Google describes its own search as three stages: crawling, indexing, then serving results. Its guide to how Search works is blunt about the attrition, saying that Search works in three stages and not all pages make it through each stage. Crawling downloads the page, indexing analyzes what's on it and stores that in a database, and serving picks from the index when somebody searches.

An assistant that grounds an answer in the open web runs a version of the same sequence. Something fetched the page at some point, something stored a representation of it, and something retrieved a handful of candidates when your customer typed a question. The generated sentence at the end feels new. The plumbing under it is the plumbing you already know, which is why an Indianapolis SEO and AEO program that skips crawlability and jumps straight to prompt tricks has skipped the only part it can affect.

Google also discovers most pages by following links. Its documentation says pages are discovered when Google extracts a link from a known page to a new page, using a category page linking to a new blog post as the example. A page that nothing links to is a page that has to be found some other way.

Google's technical requirements list three conditions for a page to be eligible at all: Googlebot isn't blocked, the page works and returns an HTTP 200 success code, and the page has indexable content. Indexable content means the text is in a file type Search supports and the content follows the spam policies. Those three conditions are the whole gate, and a page that fails any of them is invisible to everything downstream.

Sites fail on that first condition more often than owners expect, and almost never on purpose. A staging rule stayed in robots.txt after launch, or a security product added blocking directives during a migration, or a noindex tag rode along from a template nobody reviewed. None of that shows up in the way the site looks to a visitor, which is exactly why it survives for months. Run the pages you care about through the free site audit and read the crawl section first, before anyone writes a word of new content.

Google renders JavaScript. Its guide to JavaScript SEO basics describes three phases, crawling, rendering and indexing, and says a headless Chromium renders the page and executes the JavaScript once Google's resources allow. Read that last clause again. Rendering waits in a queue for capacity, so anything that only exists after the script runs arrives later than the HTML did, and may arrive during a crawl you never see.

You shouldn't assume every other crawler does as much. If your pricing table, your service area list or your phone number only appears after a client side fetch, you've made your most useful facts optional for every reader that doesn't run scripts. The same guide warns against using URL fragments to load different page content, because Googlebot has to be able to parse and extract real URLs.

For a service business, the practical version is shipping the answer in the first HTML response, giving every important view its own URL, and using real anchor tags so a crawler can follow your links without guessing.

Structured data is a standardized format for describing a page and classifying its content, and Google's introduction to structured data says you can help Google by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page. Google recommends JSON-LD where your setup allows it. The vocabulary itself comes from schema.org, which the major search engines share.

For a local service company the useful markup is unglamorous. Your legal business name, the address and phone that match everything else you publish, your hours, your service area, and the specific services you sell. That's the same information a customer asks for on the phone. Writing it once in a form software can parse means it's harder to get you wrong. Before you add anything, check that the facts are right, since structured data quality is a content problem wearing a syntax costume.

Two habits pay for themselves here. Keep a single page on your site that states your business facts in plain sentences a person would read, then mirror those facts in markup. Update both the same day anything changes. A business facts page does more for machine readability than any amount of keyword density.

Google's help page on local ranking says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, where relevance is how well a profile matches what someone searched for and distance is how far the business sits from the searcher. The same page says there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google. That sentence is worth quoting to anyone who offers to buy you one.

An assistant reading public information about your company sees your website, your Business Profile, your directory listings and whatever else is indexed. Every place those disagree is a place a model can pick the wrong version. Matching the name, address, phone, hours and service list across all of them removes that chance. Picking the right Business Profile categories is the same kind of unglamorous accuracy work.

Google's page on AI features and your website settles more arguments than any vendor deck, and it does it in two passages. It says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and no other special optimizations necessary, and that you don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in these features. It then says that meeting every requirement and policy still doesn't mean Google will crawl, index or serve the content, because indexing and serving aren't guaranteed.

Both halves of that are true at the same time. The work is real and ordinary, and the outcome stays probabilistic because it belongs to somebody else's system. Here's the honest split:

Anyone selling column three is selling something they can't deliver. That includes anyone quoting you a guaranteed citation rate from a dashboard, since the dashboard is sampling prompts, and the model's output moves between sessions.

Take your five highest value pages, usually the home page, your two best service pages, your main city page and your contact page. Then work down this list and write the answer next to each one.

• Does robots.txt allow the crawler to fetch the page, and does the page return a 200 status?
• Does any robots meta tag or header say noindex on a page you want found?
• With JavaScript turned off in your browser, can you still read the service description, the price range and the phone number?
• Does the page answer the question in its own first two paragraphs, in the words a customer would use?
• Do the name, address, phone, hours and service list match your Business Profile exactly, character for character?
• Does anything on your own site link to the page, so a crawler can find it by following links?

Every one of those is a yes or no with a fix attached. That's what makes the list worth running before you spend money on content. If you want the crawl and markup checks done for you, the audit tool reports them per page. For a read of the copy itself, our Jev Website Scanner runs Jev, a model that's documented publicly, including the places it falls short. The first scan of a site is free for up to 100 pages, and you enter an email so we can send you the report link.

Fix access first, because a page nothing can fetch can't be cited by anything. Once that's clear, rewrite your main service pages so the answer sits in the opening lines in plain language, and make your business facts identical everywhere they're published. Measure what you can actually see, which for most owners means Search Console impressions on the queries that describe the work they sell, and referral traffic from assistant domains in analytics.

None of that promises a citation, and the promise isn't available from anyone at any price. What it does is put you in the pool of pages that could be chosen, which is the only position any of us can engineer. If you'd rather have someone run the crawl, markup and business facts pass with you, that's the work described on our Indianapolis SEO and AEO page, and the audit is a reasonable place to see the current state of your own site before you decide anything.