More people are asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity questions like "where can I buy this near me" or "recommend a good bakery in Santiago." Before assuming your business would come up, we tried it ourselves with a handful of real small businesses.
Most didn't show up. Not because they're bad businesses. Because AI chat tools can't easily read a normal website. They look for information that's structured and current: what you sell, what it costs, whether you're open, what people think of you. A homepage with a hero image and a "contact us" form doesn't give them much to work with.
This is exactly why we built AI Index into Nice Catalogs. Every catalog you create is structured in a way ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity can actually read: your products, prices, descriptions, and availability, kept current every time you update your catalog. You don't have to learn anything new. You just turn it on.
Being readable to AI is only half of it. The other half is looking credible once you're found. We've noticed AI assistants tend to favor businesses with visible ratings, which is part of why we built our reviews feature to work alongside AI Index rather than as a separate thing. A structured catalog with real reviews attached gives an AI assistant two reasons to recommend you instead of one.
The same goes for photos. We covered this in why your product photos don't have to be perfect , but it's worth repeating here: a clear, well-lit product photo helps a human decide to buy, and it helps AI Index describe your product accurately when it's summarizing your catalog for someone who asked about it.
If you're still sending a static PDF as your main catalog, that's likely the biggest gap. A PDF sitting in someone's downloads folder isn't something ChatGPT or Perplexity can read or link to. We explained why a link works better than a PDF in Stop Sending Product PDFs , and the same logic applies directly to AI search: a structured catalog page is something an AI model can actually point to, and a PDF attachment is not.
We won't tell you this guarantees a mention every time someone asks. AI assistants are still inconsistent, and we don't control their models. What we can tell you is that a business with no structured presence has almost no chance, and a business with one has a real shot.
If you already have a Nice Catalogs account, check that AI Index is turned on for your catalog. If you don't have one yet, it takes a few minutes to set up.