How to get your business found by AI agents

AI agents find a business by reading what it publishes in a form they can parse: structured data on its pages, feeds, and listings in the places agents search. A business whose prices, hours, area and contact details are in that form can be found, compared and contacted by an agent. One whose details sit in images, scripts or a contact form is easy to skip.

What an agent reads when it looks for a business

When someone asks their agent for a plumber, an apartment or a product, the agent searches with a tool: a web search API, a listing search such as Openpath, or the search built into its app. Whichever it uses, the tool can only return what it was able to read from your site, your feeds and the listings about you. Six things decide whether that is enough.

1. Put schema.org structured data on your pages

Structured data is a block of JSON-LD in a page’s HTML that says, in a fixed vocabulary, what the page offers: a LocalBusiness with its hours and area, a Product with an Offer and its price, a JobPosting with its pay, an Apartment for rent, an Event with its date. Google has used it for years, so most site builders and plugins can add it.

It matters even more to agents. OpenpathBot builds listings from JSON-LD first, because it is what the owner chose to publish, and it makes a listing only when the page says enough for the title and facts to be true. A plumber’s page might carry this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Plumber",
  "name": "Eastside Plumbing",
  "url": "https://eastsideplumbing.example",
  "telephone": "+1-512-555-0142",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "1200 E 6th St",
    "addressLocality": "Austin",
    "addressRegion": "TX",
    "postalCode": "78702"
  },
  "areaServed": "Austin, TX",
  "openingHoursSpecification": [{
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday"],
    "opens": "07:00",
    "closes": "18:00"
  }],
  "priceRange": "$$"
}
</script>

Check it with Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator before you publish.

2. Keep the facts in the page itself

Prices, hours, area and how to reach you should be text in the HTML, rather than in an image, a PDF or a script that runs after the page loads. Many crawlers that feed agents don’t run scripts, and an agent reading your page sees roughly what a screen reader would.

3. Decide which bots can read your site

AI companies send different crawlers for different jobs, and robots.txt treats each one separately, so you can keep your pages out of model training and still be found in search.

This robots.txt lets search crawlers in and keeps the training ones out:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Allow: /

If your site is behind Cloudflare, check its bot settings too, because a block there applies whatever robots.txt says. Cloudflare’s Content Signals let you state the same choice in robots.txt, as in Content-Signal: search=yes, ai-train=no. OpenpathBot reads them: search=no or ai-input=no keeps it out.

4. Send a feed if you list many things

Crawling one page at a time is slow for a property manager with 300 units or a shop with 5,000 products. A feed hands over every listing at once, in a format built for it.

• Rentals: a MITS feed, the rental format many property management systems export.
• Products: a Google Merchant product feed, the same one you would send to Google Shopping.
• Jobs: a public job board on Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby, which Openpath reads directly.

Openpath reads a feed within minutes and every 6 hours after, so a rented unit or a sold-out product leaves search within hours, and messages about its listings come straight to you. Sending one is a single request.

5. Claim your listing

Openpath may list your business from a public source before you join. Claiming the listing makes it yours to change, and the messages agents already sent you are handed over. You prove it’s yours with your website’s domain, or with a code sent to the email or phone on the listing. Get listed takes your website and does the rest.

6. Answer the agents that write to you

Being found is the first half. Agents write to the inbox on your listing with the questions their person would ask: is it still available, can you come on Thursday, what will it cost. The owner who answers is the one who gets the job. A message to an owner who hasn’t claimed the listing waits only 30 days.

What about llms.txt?

llms.txt is a proposed file at a site’s root that gives AI systems a short map of the site in Markdown. Google says its AI features don’t need it, and no engine has said it ranks by it. It is cheap to add and some agents read it, so add one if you have docs or many pages. It won’t do the job of structured data or a feed.

A checklist

Questions people ask

How do I keep my site out of Openpath?

Add User-agent: OpenpathBot and Disallow: / to your robots.txt. Anyone can also ask for a collected listing to be removed, and it goes within a day. See OpenpathBot.

Will structured data help in Google too?

Yes. Google reads the same schema.org JSON-LD for rich results, and its AI features build on its regular search, so the same work helps people and agents.