How AI decides whom to recommend.

A question instead of keywords.

Into a search engine people type short phrases: “konoba Trogir”. To an AI assistant such as ChatGPT they write a whole sentence: “Where near Trogir can I eat a home-made peka, with parking, for a bigger group?” Instead of a list of links, the assistant returns an answer with a few names and short reasons for each. Whoever is not in that answer does not exist for that person at that moment.

For a small business this is not the distant future. A guest from Germany planning the summer asks an assistant in their own language, and the assistant looks for the answer on pages it can read. If your menu exists only as a photograph and your neighbour has written theirs out as text, the assistant has more to say about your neighbour.

Where AI gets its knowledge.

An assistant knows things in two ways. The first is what it learned during training, from an enormous amount of public text. That knowledge stops at some date and knows nothing about a konoba that opened later or changed its hours. The second is searching live: for questions about places, prices and opening hours, assistants today often search the internet themselves, read a few pages and build an answer from them, usually with links to the sources.

Either way, AI reads what is public: your website, your Google Business Profile, reviews, tourism portals, directories and public posts on social media. There is no secret entrance, and nobody on the outside can arrange for an assistant to mention you. All anyone can do is make sure that what AI reads is clear, correct and the same everywhere.

What makes the job easier for AI.

Nobody outside knows exactly how each assistant weighs its sources, and these tools keep changing. But the way they work shows what helps them:

• Clear facts. What you do, where, when and for whom. The sentence “Konoba near Trogir, peka to order a day ahead, parking by the house” gives an assistant something to pass on. The sentence “Experience the magic of Dalmatia” gives it nothing.
• The same details everywhere. Your name, address and phone number should read the same on the site, on the Google profile and in directories. When they differ, an assistant can mix up two businesses or offer an old number.
• Pages written as answers. People ask: “Do you allow dogs?”, “Do you have gluten-free dishes?”, “Do you drive to the airport at night?” A page that asks such questions and answers them in plain sentences hands the assistant a ready answer.
• What others write about you. Reviews on Google and mentions on portals are read as a sign that you exist and that people come.
• Text, not a picture of text. A menu as a photograph, prices inside a graphic and a scanned PDF are hard or impossible for machines to read. There is more on that in the article a page through AI's eyes.

What cannot be promised.

AI answers are not a list with fixed positions. The same question asked twice can get two different answers. They depend on how the question was put, where the person is, which assistant answers and what it read that time. Whoever promises you that ChatGPT will recommend you is promising something nobody controls, me included.

What I can do is put in order the sources AI reads from. On your site the facts are written clearly, with structured data and a separate summary for AI tools. The Google profile and the directories say the same as the site. Common questions get their answers. That does not buy a place in the answer, but it removes the reasons AI would leave you out or mention you wrongly. And what helps AI also helps Google and people, so the work is not lost if the tools change tomorrow.

How to check what AI says about you today.

The simplest way is to ask. Open ChatGPT or a similar tool and ask the kind of question your guest or customer would ask, without the name of your business. Then ask directly, with the business name and the town, what the assistant knows about you. The answer shows what AI knows, and even more what it does not know or gets wrong. Write it down and ask the same questions again in a month, because corrected facts do not show up in the answers overnight.

The free website check has the same part, “What AI says about your business”. And when someone reaches your site through a link in an AI answer, that visit shows up in your visit statistics.