Calgary, AB

How to be the business an AI assistant recommends.

When somebody asks an assistant who to hire in Calgary, it names two or three businesses and stops. There's no page two. Here's what decides who gets named, and what you can change.

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Can the assistants read your site at all?

Check robots.txt for blocks on OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. These are the live-search crawlers, and blocking them removes you from consideration entirely.

If you want us to handle the checks and website changes, see what our AI SEO agency in Calgary includes. The service page separates access checks from the engines we measure.

This is the first thing to check because it's binary and it's common. A site that blocks the live-search crawlers cannot be cited, no matter how good it is. The blocks are almost never deliberate, they arrive with a security plugin, a CDN bot-protection default, or a robots.txt copied from a template written when 'AI crawler' meant something else.

Worth separating clearly: the training crawlers (GPTBot and similar) are a genuine privacy decision and reasonable people block them. The live-search crawlers are the ones that fetch a page in order to answer a question being asked right now. Blocking those costs you the citation and buys you nothing.

Does your page have text before JavaScript runs?

Several crawlers read the raw HTML and don't execute JavaScript. If your content only appears after scripts load, they see an empty page.

Disable JavaScript in your browser and reload your homepage. What's left is approximately what those crawlers see. Sites built on certain page builders and single-page frameworks come back nearly blank, which is invisible in every other kind of audit because a human browser always runs the scripts.

This is also the check that most often surprises people who have paid for a modern-looking site. Looking current and being readable are unrelated properties.

Are you saying the specific things people ask?

Assistants answer questions, so they quote pages that answer questions. Vague positioning copy has nothing extractable in it.

'Quality service since 1998' cannot be quoted in answer to anything. 'We do same-day emergency callouts in the northwest until 9pm, and after-hours calls are answered by a person' can be quoted directly, because it answers a question somebody actually asked.

The practical move is to write the operational facts down in plain sentences: hours, service areas by name, what a first appointment involves, what you charge or how pricing works, what you don't do. Businesses tend to leave these out because they feel mundane. They are exactly what gets extracted.

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The same checks this page describes, run against your own site. About 30 seconds.

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Does the rest of the web corroborate you?

Assistants weight consensus. Being described consistently across your site, your Business Profile and third-party sources matters more than saying it well once.

An assistant assembling an answer is reconciling several sources. A business that describes itself one way on its site, another way on its Business Profile, and is listed under an old address on two directories gives it very little to be confident about, and confidence is what decides whether you're named or merely mentioned.

This is also why review presence outside your own site matters here and not only for humans. A page of testimonials you selected is weak corroboration by construction. Reviews on a platform you don't control are strong.

How do you check whether it's actually working?

Ask the assistants the question a customer would ask, in a fresh session, and screenshot the answer. Repeat monthly. The results move.

Ask the way a customer asks: 'who should I call for an emergency plumber in northwest Calgary?' rather than your business name. Searching your own name tells you the assistant can find you when prompted, which is not the question. The question is whether you're named unprompted.

Use a fresh or logged-out session, because these tools personalise on your history and will happily name you back to you. Screenshot the result and date it. Answers shift as sources are recrawled, so a single check is a snapshot and the trend is the signal.

Expect inconsistency, and don't over-read one bad answer. What matters is whether you show up across several phrasings and several months, not whether you won one query on one day.

Is this replacing Google?

No. It's an additional place to be found, and right now it's an unusually cheap one because most local competitors haven't looked at it.

Google search and the map pack still carry most local commercial intent, and anyone telling you to abandon them is selling something. The reason this is worth attention is not that it's bigger, it's that the competitive field is nearly empty, and the technical part of it is often a same-day fix.

That window closes. The blocks get removed, the operational pages get written, and being named stops being a question of who bothered first. The advantage available now is a timing advantage, which is a real one and a temporary one.

Common questions

Is this the same as SEO?
It overlaps but it isn't the same. Crawlability and clear content help both. The difference is that search ranks a list of pages and an assistant produces one answer naming two or three businesses, so the gap between being third and being fifth is much larger.
Do I need to block the training crawlers?
That's a privacy judgement and either answer is defensible. Just don't confuse them with the live-search crawlers. Blocking those removes you from answers being generated right now, with no privacy benefit.
How long until I show up?
If the cause was a crawler block, it can be days once the site is recrawled. If the cause is that there's nothing quotable on your site, it's as long as it takes to write the pages. Measured in weeks.
Can I pay to be named?
No. There's no ad product that places you inside these answers, which is precisely why the technical and content work is the whole game at the moment.

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