Become the answer.

Ask an AI to find a potter, a plumber, or a photography course and it replies with a few names and a few links, chosen from thousands. This site asks one question: how does a small business become one of them?

Tricks fail when we test them. What remains is seven conditions your website must meet, and a lot of measuring to learn what tips the choice.

The seven outcomes

Before any AI system can recommend you, seven things must be true. Each one is a section of the manual, written in plain English, with the evidence behind every recommendation. Where nobody knows the answer yet, the manual says so.

1. Reachable. A machine can fetch your pages.
2. Kept. It can store and return the right version of them.
3. Understood. It can tell what your business is, does, and where.
4. Relevant. Your pages answer the question being asked, and the questions behind it.
5. Worth choosing. They contain something better than the summary everyone else has.
6. Trusted. The claims hold up, and someone real stands behind them.
7. Usable. An AI can quote you without error, and a customer can act on what they find.

You can check and fix the first three; most of it can run on autopilot. The last four take real work. The manual covers all seven.

We'd rather count than guess

A measurement study sits behind the manual. We put real small-business questions to the major AI search systems, over and over, and record which pages they cite, which they ignore, and what the cited pages contain that the ignored ones lack.

The first study: 50 questions, asked 4 ways, of 3 AI systems, 3 times each. That makes 1,800 recorded answers across five kinds of small business: local professionals, home services, artists and makers, coaches and course businesses, and small shops.

We published our method, and what we expect to find, before collecting a single result. You can check our findings against our predictions. Science treats that as routine; SEO treats it as unheard of.

The folklore ledger

Add an llms.txt file to rank in Google. Break your pages into AI-sized chunks. Use special AI schema. Write a page for every question.

You have read the tips. So have we, and the evidence behind most of them is missing. We keep a public ledger of popular claims: what the platforms require, what they recommend, what the data supports, and what turns out to be folklore. When our measurements prove a claim wrong, it goes in the ledger. When they prove one right, that goes in too.

Who's behind this

The team behind bernard writes and runs Content is Everything. bernard is a platform that hosts and looks after small-business websites, including this one. That is our interest, stated plainly: we build the kind of sites this research studies, we test our own advice along with everyone else's, and every article says exactly what bernard can and cannot do about its subject.

Research by Spencer Thursfield. Edited by Spencer Thursfield and Lindsay Smith. Full disclosure, method and corrections policy live on the About page.