A first week plan for AI discoverability
Seven days, one small job a day, in the order that stops you wasting the later ones.
A bakery in Simi Valley does not need a strategy deck. It needs someone to do the next right thing for about an hour a day, in the right order, and then stop. This is that order. Each day links to the page in this series that explains the step in full, and the AI discoverability guide sets out the whole picture.
The sequence matters more than the individual steps. Measuring after you have changed things leaves you nothing to compare against. Polishing copy on a site that blocks the crawlers is polishing a locked shop window. So the plan starts with the two things that make every later step count.
Day 1: Write down where you stand
Before touching anything, write five questions a customer would ask, such as "best custom birthday cakes in Simi Valley" or "bakery near Moorpark with gluten free bread". Ask each one a few times in two assistants with web search on. Record whether you were named and which sites were cited. It is a rough baseline, and rough is fine, as long as it exists before Day 2. The full method, including why one look is not enough, is in how to measure AI discoverability. If you want the background first, read how AI assistants find a business.
Day 2: Make sure the door is open
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser and look for lines naming AI crawlers. Then ask whoever runs your hosting or CDN whether bot blocking is switched on. A single setting can shut out the systems that fetch pages for AI answers, and it is easy to have it switched on without knowing. Can AI crawlers read your site? lists the named crawlers and what blocking each one costs. Our lexicon entry on AI crawlers has the definitions.
Day 3: Write the one sentence
Near the top of your homepage, write one plain sentence that says who you are, where you are and what you do. For a made-up example: "Rosa's Bakery is a family bakery in Simi Valley, California, making custom cakes and fresh bread daily." Put the same sentence, or a close version, on your About page and in your meta description. Why name, city and service belong in one sentence shows good and bad versions.
Day 4: Find what AI cannot see
Check the pages that matter for text that only exists inside images, menus uploaded as PDFs, hours on a photo of a chalkboard, and anything that appears only after scripts run. For a bakery, the menu is the usual culprit. Content AI cannot see gives a test for each case.
Day 5: Make your details agree
Put your name, address, phone, hours and category side by side from your website, your Google Business Profile and the two or three directories you know about. Every difference is a question an assistant has to settle without you. Fix the ones you control today. When your details disagree walks through the audit.
Day 6: Look at the sites that speak for you
Go back to the Day 1 notes and list every domain that was cited. Claim the directory and review listings you can, correct them, and note the local lists or associations you could legitimately be on. The sites AI reads about you explains which kind of source needs which response.
Day 7: Check your markup, then stop
Run your homepage through a structured data validator and compare every value with the visible page. Delete anything wrong before adding anything new; stale hours in markup are worse than no markup. Does structured data help AI? gives the honest answer and the short list of types worth having. Then put a date in the calendar three or four weeks out to repeat Day 1 exactly as you did it the first time.
What not to do this week
Do not rewrite the whole site, buy a plugin that promises AI rankings, add a page for every nearby town, or ask the same assistant twenty times a day to see if anything moved. None of it is the work, and the last one just makes you anxious. Do not expect anything you do this week to show up in answers this week.
If you only have time for one thing, do Day 2, then run the free AIOInsights check to see which of the on-site steps your homepage already passes, so you can skip the days you do not need.
Questions
What should a small business do first to be found by AI assistants?
The first step for a small business that wants to be found by AI assistants is to record a baseline: ask an AI assistant the questions customers ask, several times each, and note whether the business is named and which sources are cited. The second is to confirm AI crawlers are not blocked by robots.txt or a firewall, because no later fix matters if the pages cannot be fetched.
How long before this work shows up in AI answers?
Changes made to help AI assistants find a small business do not show up in AI answers within a week. Changed pages and listings have to be fetched again before any AI answer can reflect them, and answers vary between runs, so a fair comparison needs a second round of the same questions, asked the same way, a few weeks after the changes. The first week builds the baseline and removes the obvious blockers.
More on AI discoverability
This page is part of AI Discoverability, the AIOInsights guide to whether AI systems can find, read and name a business.
- How do AI assistants find a business to name in an answer?
- Can the AI systems that answer questions actually fetch your pages?
- Which content on your site is invisible to AI retrieval?
- Why one sentence with your name, city and service does so much work
- What happens when your business details disagree across the web?
- The sites AI reads about you, and why your own site is often not the one it cites
- Does structured data help AI find your business?
- How to measure AI discoverability without fooling yourself
- Where AI discoverability work falls short