People are asking AI, not just searching
45% of US adults used an AI tool to find a local business in the past year, up from 6% the year before (BrightLocal, 2026). Someone asks ChatGPT “a dentist near me that takes Delta Dental and is open Saturday”, and the assistant looks around the web for an answer.
Two kinds of sources decide what it says. Listings and reviews (your Google Business Profile, Yelp, and the rest) carry the most weight in deciding which businesses get named. Your website supplies the details: which insurance you take, your real hours, what each service costs. If those details aren’t readable on your site, the assistant can’t match you to the question.
What AI assistants can and can’t read
When ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Mode fetch a page, they read the HTML they’re sent. Tests found they don’t run JavaScript. That means anything delivered by a script, like a hours widget, a booking pop-up, or a reviews carousel, may as well not exist for them.
Most website builders, WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace included, do send their text as HTML, so the page itself is usually readable. The gaps are in what it says. We checked 64 Oregon dental and chiropractic websites in October 2026, eight on each of the common builders. Every home page’s text was readable, and only one site blocked AI bots. But 39 of the 64 had business details missing from, or disagreeing with, the data search engines read behind the page. An assistant can only repeat what a site actually says.
What SayPages does
- Top scores, guaranteed. 90+ mobile PageSpeed and every technical SEO check passing, or we fix it free. That’s for your visitors and for Google; we don’t claim speed changes what an AI says.
- Every fact in plain text. Your hours, services, insurance, prices, and contact details are written on the page, where every assistant can read them.
- The same details everywhere. Your name, address, phone, and hours come from one record, so the page and the data search engines read behind it never disagree.
- Open to AI search. Your site lets in the search bots the major assistants use. Some hosting setups block them without the owner knowing.
- Kept current. AI assistants often repeat out-of-date details about small businesses, and the only fix is correcting the source. On SayPages you say “we’re open Saturdays now” and your site is right within minutes.
- Checked before launch. We check your site the way AI assistants and Google read it: bots let in, every fact readable, every detail matching. Anything that fails, we fix.
What doesn’t work
A lot of what’s sold as “AI optimization” fails when tested. Studies found llms.txt files almost never get read, and adding structured data alone didn’t make pages cited more often. Speed matters for visitors, but there’s no evidence a faster score makes an AI recommend you. We won’t sell you any of it as an AI feature.
What we won’t promise
No one controls what an AI assistant says. The same question, asked twice, usually names a different set of businesses. So we don’t promise recommendations or rankings in AI answers, and you should be wary of anyone who does. We promise what’s in our control: an AI assistant that looks at your site finds it open, readable, and right.