How AI assistants pick a business to recommend

A growing share of first contacts now begin with a question typed into an AI assistant rather than a search box: who builds software for pharma distributors, what does a business website cost, is there a studio in Hyderabad that does fixed prices. The assistant answers by reading pages. Whether yours is one of them is mostly decided by how plainly it speaks.

What an assistant can and cannot use

An assistant cannot infer what you do from a hero line that says you transform businesses. It can use a sentence that says "Samastack is a software studio in Hyderabad that builds a business's website, customer app and back office as one system it owns." It cannot use a price it has to guess; it can use "a website between ₹40,000 and ₹1.2 lakh, about two weeks." It cannot use a claim that contradicts another page of yours, because it has read both.

Nobody outside the companies that build these assistants knows the exact weighting, and anyone who claims to is selling something. But the pattern in what gets cited is consistent enough to act on.

Five checks for your own site

1. The entity sentence. Somewhere near the top of the homepage, one plain sentence with the name, the city, what you do and for whom. If it only appears in the footer, move it up.
2. Prices you are willing to state. A band with a caveat beats no number at all. "Between X and Y for typical scope; a fixed quote follows a call" is a sentence an assistant can repeat and a buyer can act on.
3. Questions answered as questions. A page of the questions people actually ask, each answered in two or three plain sentences, marked up as questions and answers so it can be read as such. Ours is at /faq, and every industry page carries its own.
4. The same facts everywhere. Your prices, your city, your services and your contact address should read the same on every page, on your business profile and in any directory that lists you. Inconsistency reads as unreliability.
5. Structured data that matches the visible text. Mark up the organisation, the services and the questions, and make the markup say exactly what the page says. Markup that disagrees with the page is worse than none.

What this looks like on a Samastack build

Every website we build ships with the organisation, the services, the location and the questions marked up, with plain answers on the page that match the markup word for word, and with a text file at the root that tells assistants what the site is and where the facts are. The full description is on the AI search page. None of it guarantees a citation. All of it removes the reasons a page gets skipped.

The honest caveat: being cited takes time and depends on what people ask. What you control is whether your pages are the kind that can be cited at all.

Where this applies: how every build ships ready for AI search, the website that gets cited, the three doors customers arrive through.