Field notes
Getting seen by AI answer engines
Practical guides on AI visibility for UK small businesses. Each one answers a single question properly and points at the free scanner that automates it. We left the breathless futurism out.
- № 01
How to check if ChatGPT mentions your business
Why asking ChatGPT about yourself proves nothing, the six-step manual protocol that does work, and what separates being named from being recommended.
- № 02
Why ChatGPT doesn't mention your brand
The five failure modes behind an empty answer — missing from sources, nothing quotable, blocked crawlers, an ambiguous name, an entrenched competitor — and how to tell which one is yours.
- № 03
What is an AI visibility score?
What the 0–100 number actually measures, what counts as a good score, how it differs from a Google ranking, and why it moves when you haven't changed anything.
- № 04
How to check if your site appears in Google AI Overviews
Search Console won't tell you — Overview impressions are folded in unlabelled. The five-step manual check, and why the most quotable passage beats the highest-ranked page.
- № 05
Should you block AI crawlers?
GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot do three different jobs — training, search indexing, live fetching — and the right robots.txt answer differs for each. Including the one we got wrong ourselves.
- № 06
What is llms.txt?
The proposed AI content-map file: what goes in it, who actually reads it today (not Google), and the honest case for spending twenty minutes on it — after the work that matters.