When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity “who is the best boat rental in Protaras?” or “which accountant in Limassol speaks Russian?”, the assistant names a few businesses and skips the rest. Getting named is not luck. It comes down to whether AI can read your website, whether it trusts what it reads, and whether other sites say the same thing about you.
The short answer
AI assistants recommend businesses they can identify with confidence. Make your website readable to AI crawlers, describe your business the same way everywhere, get mentioned on sites they already trust, and answer real customer questions in plain sentences. Expect results over months, not days.
1. Make sure AI can actually read your pages
AI crawlers read the HTML your server sends. If your page is built by JavaScript after it loads, or a plugin conflict leaves it empty, the assistant sees a blank page. When we audited our own site in October 2026 we found several pages that looked fine in a browser but sent crawlers an empty body.
- Check that your
robots.txtdoes not block GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended. - Open your page with “View source”. If you can’t find your main text there, neither can most AI crawlers.
- Keep pages fast. A page that answers in well under a second is crawled more often and more completely.
2. Be one business, described one way
AI models build a picture of your business by matching facts across the web. If your website says one address, your Google profile another and a directory a third, the assistant cannot be sure they are the same business, and it plays safe by not naming you.
- Use exactly the same name, address and phone number on your website, Google Business Profile, social profiles and directories.
- Add Organization or LocalBusiness schema to your website, with one ID, and list your official profiles under
sameAs. - If you run more than one brand under one company, say so on both websites and in the schema, so the brands support each other instead of competing.
3. Get mentioned where AI already looks
An assistant trusts your website more when other sources agree with it. For a Cyprus business, the useful places are:
- your Google Business Profile, with real photos, services and reviews;
- industry directories and review sites that rank for your trade (for agencies: Clutch, DesignRush, GoodFirms; for tourism: Tripadvisor);
- local news sites, associations and chambers of commerce;
- your clients’ and partners’ websites, with a line such as “website by” or “official partner”.
4. Answer the questions your customers ask
Assistants quote pages that answer a question directly. Write headings the way customers ask (“How much does a boat rental cost in Ayia Napa?”) and answer in the first one or two sentences, with real numbers: prices, times, distances, opening hours. Then go into detail.
Mark the questions up with FAQPage schema, and keep the schema word-for-word the same as the answers on the page. Search engines ignore, and can penalise, markup that says something the page doesn’t.
5. Publish an llms.txt file
llms.txt is a short Markdown file at the root of your site that lists your business facts and your most important pages for AI tools. Not every AI crawler reads it yet, but it costs little, and it gives assistants a clean summary instead of making them guess from your menus. You can see ours at malaka.cy/llms.txt.
6. Only claim what you can prove
Star ratings, “number one in Cyprus” and speed claims get checked. Never add review ratings to your schema unless they come from real reviews someone can see, and publish measurable claims with their source and date. Contradictions cost you more trust than modest, true numbers.
7. Speak your customers’ languages
Many people in Cyprus ask assistants in Greek, English or Russian. If your site only exists in one language, you are invisible to the others. Translated pages need proper hreflang tags so search engines and AI know they belong together.
How do you know it is working?
Ask the assistants yourself, in the words a customer would use, every month. Note which businesses they name and which sources they cite. Tools such as Rank Math’s AI Visibility tracker can repeat those questions automatically and show the trend.
Common questions
How long does it take to be recommended by ChatGPT?
Usually months. Fixing your own website can take days, but assistants rely on consistent information across the web, and building those outside mentions takes time.
Does normal SEO still matter?
Yes. Several assistants search the web live before they answer, so pages that rank well in Google and Bing are more likely to be read and cited.
Can I pay to be recommended by AI assistants?
Not in their normal answers. What you can do is make your business easy to identify, easy to verify and easy to quote.
Want us to check how AI sees your business? Our websites ship with the technical groundwork for Google and AI search built in. Ask for a free 20-minute call.