Picture someone in Portland asking ChatGPT where they can take a beginner wheel-throwing class on a Saturday. The assistant never sees your nice flyer. It reads text. If your class schedule only exists inside a JPEG, then as far as the software can tell, you don't have a schedule.
I've built a site for a small-batch pottery studio, and studios like that make a good test case. The business is visual, so the natural move is to let the photos do the talking. That works for people. It doesn't work for software trying to answer a question about you.
If I were checking a studio site from scratch, this is what I'd look at.
Put the facts in plain text
- Hours. Type them on the page. Don't rely on a designed graphic or an Instagram screenshot. Include holiday changes.
- Location. Write out the full street address and add a line about parking or which door to use. A map embed on its own isn't enough.
- Prices. Spell out each class name, its length and its price in a sentence or a simple table.
- Services. Give classes, open studio, memberships, firing services and commissions each a short heading and a paragraph.
- PDFs. If the schedule or price list is a download, copy the important parts onto a regular page. Keep the PDF as a printable extra.
Here's a quick test. Select all the text on a page and paste it into a blank document. What survives is roughly what a crawler gets.
Add basic schema markup
Schema markup is a small block of code, usually JSON-LD, that labels your information: this is the business name, this is the address, these are the opening hours. For a studio I'd start with the LocalBusiness type. It's an afternoon of work, not a rebuild.
Google's own guidance makes two points worth knowing. Structured data should match the visible content on the page. And you don't need special AI-only files like llms.txt to show up in its AI features (Google Search Central). The plain-text work matters more than the code.
One last check is your robots.txt file. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that want to appear in ChatGPT search should allow OAI-SearchBot. Some security settings block AI bots across the board, and owners often have no idea.
None of this guarantees a recommendation, and nobody can promise you one. What it does is remove the most common reason an assistant skips a good shop: it couldn't find the answer.
Your photos sell the work, but your text is what gets you found.
