Getting found by AI agents
Practical guides for business owners on how AI assistants and agents find businesses, compare them and book with them, and on what you can change so that they pick you.
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We checked 120 Austin dental websites the way an AI assistant would. None showed bookable appointment times.
A scan of 120 Austin dental practices on October 1, 2026, with every booking page checked by hand on October 5: 18% blocked a plain browser at the door, a quarter of booking pages had a CAPTCHA, most 'book online' buttons led to a request form, and not one page showed open times to an anonymous visitor. The practices' reviews were excellent, but the plumbing of their websites wasn't.
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How to get your products into ChatGPT shopping: the feed, the crawler, and the merchant application
What OpenAI's own merchant documentation requires: the nine product fields, how the feed is delivered, which crawler to allow, where to apply, and where checkout happens now.
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Should you block AI agents from your website? What Amazon's fight with Muse means for a small business
Amazon shut Meta's Muse out of its store in September. Plenty of small businesses block agents too, by accident. Here's how to make the decision on purpose, bot by bot.
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ACP vs UCP: the two protocols that decide whether an AI agent can buy from you
OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google's Universal Commerce Protocol explained for business owners who need to brief a developer.
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The agent-readiness checklist: 12 things to check before an AI agent shops for your customer
A twelve-point checklist for whether AI agents can find your business, read it, transact with it and trust it. You can work through it in an afternoon.
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Discover in AI, buy on your site: what ChatGPT's checkout retreat means for smaller businesses
OpenAI pulled in-chat checkout six months after launch and sent purchases back to merchants' own sites. For businesses, the lesson has to do with where your conversion actually happens.
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GEO, AEO and agent optimization: what's actually different
Generative engine optimization is about getting cited in AI answers, while agent optimization is about getting chosen and transacted with. The two overlap, but the differences between them decide what work you should do.
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How to get your business found by AI agents like Muse, Gemini Spark and ChatGPT
A practical guide for business owners on what consumer AI agents check before they recommend a business, and which changes make a real difference.
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Meta Muse just launched. Here's what it means for your business
Meta's personal AI agent shops, books and schedules for its owner, and it hit the top of the app charts in weeks. Here's what a business owner should know and do.
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Schema markup for AI agents: the seven types that matter for a local or service business
Structured data is how an AI agent reads facts about your business without guessing. These are the Schema.org types worth adding, in order, and the mistakes that make them useless.
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Does your website need an llms.txt file? What it does and doesn't do
llms.txt won't lift your search rankings, but it does change what an AI agent understands about your business. Here's when to add one and what to put in it.
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What is agentic commerce? A plain-English guide for business owners
Agentic commerce means AI agents finding, comparing and buying on behalf of people. Here's what it looks like in 2026 and why it changes how businesses get chosen.
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Why AI agents will read reviews of your business written by other agents
Google and Yelp record what people thought, but not whether the booking API worked or whether the quoted price held. Agents will want that record, and it will shape who gets recommended.