In November 2026 we analysed 2,538 answers from AI assistants to questions about studios and agencies in Portugal: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI search. When our website was among the sources the assistant read, Developh was recommended in 81.6% of the answers. When it was not, in 2.3%.
For a small business, the takeaway is practical. The assistant recommends whoever it can read. This guide covers what to do to be read, in the order we would do it, with what we learned on our own website.
Check that AI can read your website
The ChatGPT and Claude crawlers download the page but do not run JavaScript, according to a Vercel study of these crawlers' requests. If the text only shows up after the browser runs code, the page is empty to them.
It happened to us. Our article on what a website costs in Portugal reached the ChatGPT crawler with 81 words: the menu and the footer. We moved the text to the server and the same article now arrives with 2,237.
The test takes ten minutes. Open one of your pages, choose "View page source" and search for a sentence from the middle of the text. If you cannot find it, neither can AI. Also check that your robots.txt file does not block crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot.
You do not need special files. Google says pages need no markup or files of their own to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode: they have to be indexed and eligible to show in Search.
Write pages that answer a buying question
Being read is not enough. In the same measurement, the assistants read our pages for 57 questions and recommended another studio. Almost every time, the page was missing the price or the reason to choose us.
Someone who asks an assistant "who does this and what does it cost" wants an answer with numbers. The page that has them is the one that makes it into the answer. That is why we published our tiers: a Pilot from €1,000, typical projects between €5,000 and €15,000 and custom work from €15,000.
- A price or a price range, and what it includes.
- A timeline, in weeks.
- Who it is for, and who it is not for.
- Real cases with names and numbers: tables booked, languages, load time.
- The questions customers ask on the phone, with the answer underneath.
One page per service works better than one page with everything. Each one answers a different question.
Look after what others say about you
Assistants trust third parties more than they trust you. A University of Toronto study shows AI engines lean towards third-party content. Ahrefs, across 75,000 brands, found a 0.664 correlation between brand mentions on the web and presence in AI Overviews. For backlinks, 0.218.
For a small business this starts with the Google Business Profile: services written out in full, a description, recent photos and a reply to every review. Then come the directories in your industry and the local press. The name, address and phone number have to match everywhere.
Reviews are asked for one by one, from real customers. Fake or commissioned reviews are a misleading commercial practice in Portugal, under Decree-Law 109-G/2021. And since May 2026 Google has applied its spam policies to generative AI responses as well.
Register the website with both engines
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free. Submit the sitemap to both and see which pages are indexed. Bing matters more than it looks: it has an AI performance report that shows when Copilot cites one of your pages. Ours showed 36 citations in three months.
If you publish often, IndexNow tells Bing about each new page the moment it goes out.
Measure without fooling yourself
The same question gets a different answer every time. A question asked once measures nothing.
Write down the ten questions a customer would ask before hiring you. Ask each one three times in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Note who is recommended and which sources show up. Then open those sources: they are the list of places you need to be.
Each assistant reads different sources. In our measurement we appeared in 19% of ChatGPT's answers and 3% of Google's. Doing well in one does not carry over to the other.
And ask every new customer how they found you. It is the cheapest measurement there is.
Where to start
| What to do | Why | Time |
|---|---|---|
| View page source | On three pages. If the text is not there, AI does not read it | 10 minutes |
| Google profile | Services, description and reviews that assistants cite | 1 hour |
| Price and timeline | On the service pages. Without them, the assistant reads the page and recommends someone else | 1 day |
| Five reviews | Asked from real customers. Third-party mentions weigh more than links | 1 week |
| Ten questions | Three times each. They show the sources you are still missing from | 1 hour a month |
What is not worth it
Buying mentions, writing your own "best of" list and publishing dozens of near-identical pages. SISTRIX observed websites with self-promotional lists losing up to 49% of their Google visibility from January 2026. What you lose is the whole domain, for a gain that does not last.
If you want help
The quick audit in Developh Pro is free and measures how your website loads on a phone. If you want us to handle the rest with you, from server-rendered text to service pages, get in touch.
