AI Talks About Your Business. You Should Probably Control What It Says.

Try something right now. Open ChatGPT and type your business name. Read the answer. Is it right?

For about 97 out of 100 UK businesses, the answer is no. Sometimes it's close but wrong. Sometimes it's completely made up. And sometimes ChatGPT will confidently tell someone your restaurant closes at 9pm when you're open until midnight, or that your plumbing firm doesn't cover their area when you've been servicing it for twenty years.

The problem isn't that AI is stupid. It's that AI doesn't have your information. It's guessing. And it guesses with the same confidence whether it's right or wrong.

There's a fix, and it takes about five minutes. The AI Discovery Files WordPress plugin is a free, open-source tool that lets you tell AI systems exactly who your business is, what you do, how to spell your name, and what they're allowed to say. Let me walk you through what it actually looks like.

AI Doesn't Know Your Business. It Thinks It Does.

When we tested 100 UK small businesses in ChatGPT, only 3 showed up accurately. The rest? A mix of silence, outdated information, and outright fabrication.

Our Q1 2026 adoption study put harder numbers on it. We crawled nearly 2,000 domains and found that 99.7% of UK websites have zero AI discovery files. Not a single one. These businesses are invisible to every AI assistant their customers use daily.

Van L. Baker, Research VP at Gartner, nailed the root cause in an InformationWeek interview:

"Large language models are pattern recognition and pattern generation engines. They have zero understanding of the content they produce."

Van L. Baker, Research VP, Gartner

I've seen this first hand. I've watched ChatGPT tell a potential customer that a client of ours stopped trading in 2019. They're still very much open. The AI pulled that "fact" from nowhere and presented it like gospel. That's not a minor inconvenience; that's lost revenue.

The AI Discovery Files plugin gives AI systems something better than guesses. It gives them your actual data, in formats they're designed to read. Here's what you get when you install it.

Your Business Identity, In Your Words

The Identity tab is where everything starts. Your business name, legal name, tagline, contact details, location, and services. The plugin pulls a few basics from WordPress automatically (site name, tagline), but the real value comes from what you add yourself.

Everything you enter here feeds into llms.txt and identity.json, the two files AI systems check first when trying to understand who you are. Think of it as your business card for machines.

Notice the banner at the top: once you've activated two or more files, you qualify for the AI Visibility Directory. That's a free listing with a dofollow backlink, which helps both your SEO and your AI visibility.

Tell AI What to Call You (And What Not To)

This is the feature that made me build the plugin in the first place. Four fields that solve four real problems:

Also Known As lists your alternative names. If your company is officially "TheCompany" but people search for "Company Inc." or "TCO," put them all here. AI systems will connect the dots.

Never Call Us is the one I love most. Got a competitor with a similar name? An old trading name you dropped years ago? Put it here. AI will know not to confuse you with them. I've seen AI chatbots mix up businesses with similar names dozens of times. This field stops that.

Pronunciation Guide matters more than you'd think. Voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant) are recommending businesses out loud now. If your name is "365i" and it should be said "three-six-five-eye," this field tells them. Without it, they'll guess. Badly.

Common Misspellings means if someone types your name wrong when asking an AI, it can auto-correct. Small thing. Big difference in whether AI finds you or gives up.

All four fields get published in your brand.txt file, which AI systems read to understand your naming conventions.

Your Brand Voice, Not AI's Version

Left to its own devices, AI will describe your business in whatever tone it feels like. Usually that's corporate-bland, stripped of personality, and nothing like how you'd actually describe yourself.

The Content tab changes that.

Brand Voice tells AI your tone. "Professional but approachable. We use plain English, avoid jargon, and speak with quiet confidence rather than hype." That's not just nice-to-have; it directly shapes how AI systems phrase their answers about you.

Taglines gives AI your official straplines. "Your digital partner for growth" is very different from whatever ChatGPT might invent for you.

Boilerplate / About Text is the paragraph AI can use verbatim. Think of it as the summary you'd put in a press release or your LinkedIn company page. If an AI system needs a quick description of who you are, it'll pull from here rather than making one up.

Key People lets you list founders, directors, and team members. I've seen ChatGPT attribute the wrong person as CEO of a client's company. This stops that.

Martha van Berkel, CEO of Schema App, summed this up well in a piece for Search Engine Journal:

"Context, not content, now drives AI visibility, making structured data the strategic data layer every enterprise must prioritize."

Martha van Berkel, CEO, Schema App

She's talking about enterprises, but the principle applies just as much to a three-person firm in Corby. The plugin gives you the same structured data toolkit that the likes of Stripe and Cloudflare use, without needing a developer or a budget.

Your Content, Your Rules

This is the part that surprises most people. You can actually tell AI systems what they're allowed to do with your content.

AI Content Usage gives you four options. "Allow freely" means no restrictions. "Allow with attribution" (the recommended setting) means AI can reference your content but must credit you. "Restrict usage" limits it to reference only. "Prohibit" says hands off entirely.

AI Model Training is separate. Even if you're happy for ChatGPT to quote your website, you might not want your content used to train the next version of GPT. "Restrict training" is the recommended middle ground: your content can be used at query time, but not baked into training datasets.

Content Licence specifies the legal terms your content is published under. This gets written into your ai.txt and ai.json files, so AI crawlers know the rules before they scrape.

Will every AI system respect these permissions today? Honestly, not all of them. But the direction is clear. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are all building systems to read and respect these signals. The businesses that have these files in place now will benefit first.

Track Your Progress

The Status tab shows your progress at a glance. Three tiers, ten files total. You don't need to do all ten at once.

Essential (2 files: llms.txt + ai.txt) takes about two minutes and gets you the basics. AI now knows who you are and what you've given permission for. If you do nothing else, do this.

Recommended (4 more: ai.json, identity.json, brand.txt, faq-ai.txt) adds structured identity, brand rules, and pre-answered FAQs. This is where the real accuracy improvements kick in. Takes another few minutes of form-filling.

Complete (4 more: developer-ai.txt, robots-ai.txt, llms.html, llm.txt) is the full set. Developer context, AI crawler directives, and compatibility files. Most businesses won't need these straight away, but they're there when you're ready.

Each file has its own toggle. Turn them on one at a time, preview them before they go live, and work through the tiers at whatever pace suits you.

Five Minutes. Free. No Catch.

Here's the actual process:

1. Install. Go to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress dashboard. Search "AI Discovery Files." Install and activate. Thirty seconds.
2. Fill in your details. The Identity tab pulls some basics from WordPress. Add your services, contact info, brand voice, and FAQs. The more you put in, the better AI represents you.
3. Toggle your files. Start with Essential (llms.txt + ai.txt). Add more when you're ready.

The plugin is on WordPress.org right now. Free. GPL v2. No premium tier, no upsell, no feature gating. Every capability is available to every user.

After activating, run your site through the AI Visibility Checker to confirm everything's working. It scans every file, validates the content, and gives you a score.

If you're thinking about AI visibility for your business, this plugin is the fastest way to get started. And if you're a web designer or agency managing multiple WordPress sites, the developer hooks make it customisable across all your client sites.

Frequently Asked Questions