Structure Your Website for AI Search | Visibility Guide for Local Businesses
Three weeks ago I sat in a cafe in Hitchin with a locksmith who'd been in business for nine years. Pulled up his website on my laptop. "Show me your services page," I said.
He had one.
One page. Listing emergency lockouts, lock changes, safe installations, UPVC door repairs, window locks, key cutting, and security assessments. All on a single page, separated by bold headings and a couple of stock photos.
"What's wrong with that?" he asked.
Nothing, if you're a human who can scroll. Everything, if you're an AI trying to figure out what to recommend when someone asks "who can fix a jammed UPVC door lock in Hitchin?"
His competitor down the road in Stevenage? Separate page for every service. Got recommended by ChatGPT three times the week before. The locksmith in front of me? Zero mentions. Ever.
Why AI cares about your site structure more than Google ever did
Google was patient. It would crawl your site, follow links, index pages, and over time figure out what you were about. You could get away with a messy structure if your content was decent and you had some backlinks.
AI search is not patient.
When Perplexity or ChatGPT pulls information from the web, it's looking for the clearest, most specific match for what someone's asking. It scans. It extracts. It decides. And if your website is a jumble of services and locations all mixed together on a handful of pages, the AI just... skips you. Finds someone whose site is easier to understand.
Not because your business is worse. Because your website is harder to read. For a machine, anyway.
One page, one purpose
I say this to every client who sits down with me. It's become a bit of a catchphrase round our office (I know, sad).
Every page on your website should be about one thing. Not two things. Not "this and also that." One thing.
If you're a plumber who does boiler installations, bathroom fitting, and emergency callouts, those are three pages. Not a "Services" page with three sections. Three distinct pages, each one properly covering that single service.
"But Dan, that's loads of pages."
Yeah. It is. That's the point.
When someone asks an AI "who installs boilers in Baldock?", the AI is looking for the most relevant page it can find. A dedicated boiler installation page in Baldock beats a generic services page every single time. The generic page might mention boilers somewhere in paragraph four, but the AI doesn't care about paragraph four. It cares about what the page is fundamentally about.
And this applies to locations too. If you serve Hitchin, Letchworth, Stevenage, and Royston, you need separate location-specific content. Not the same text with the town name swapped out (AI sees through that trick in about half a second), but genuinely different content for each area.
A gas engineer I work with has a Royston page that talks about the older housing stock near the town centre and the particular boiler issues those properties tend to have. His Stevenage page focuses on the larger estates with combi boiler installations. Different areas, different content, different customers. That's what proper location pages look like.
Internal linking is where the magic happens
OK so you've got your individual pages. Brilliant.
Now connect them.
This is where I see most local businesses fall apart. They create the pages but forget to link them to each other in any meaningful way. Or they chuck a load of links in the footer and call it done.
Footer links are fine. But they don't tell AI anything about relationships between your services. What you need are contextual links within your actual content.
On your boiler installation page, you might write: "If your boiler is beyond repair and you're weighing up your options, we've written about the signs that mean a boiler replacement is your best bet." That sentence tells an AI two things: these services are related, and this business offers both.
Compare that to a footer that just lists "Boiler Installation | Boiler Replacement | Boiler Servicing." The footer is a filing system. The contextual link is a conversation.
We actually wrote a whole piece on how internal linking affects AEO performance if you want to dig into this further.
The FAQ trick that keeps working
Bit of a tangent but this is too useful to leave out.
Don't create one massive FAQ page for your entire business. Create a small FAQ section (five to eight questions) for each main service.
Then link each FAQ to its parent service page and back again.
This works because AI engines are fundamentally question-answer machines. That's what they do all day. When your site has a specific question that matches what someone's asking, connected to a service page that provides the full context, you become the obvious source to cite.
A landscaper in Letchworth I worked with added service-specific FAQs to five pages. Things like "how long does artificial turf last in a north-facing garden?" and "do I need planning permission for a raised deck in a conservation area?" Within a month, ChatGPT was pulling answers from his site regularly. He'd done nothing else.
Nothing.
Location pages (the good kind, not the spam kind)
Right. Deep breath.
I need to talk about location pages because I see so many terrible ones. "Locksmith Services in Hitchin." "Locksmith Services in Stevenage." "Locksmith Services in Baldock." Same text, different town name. Sometimes they don't even bother changing the town name in every spot. I've seen pages that say "we serve Hitchin" in the first paragraph and "call us for Stevenage service" two paragraphs later.
Stop it.
A location page that works for AI needs to actually say something about that location.
What are the common property types there? What specific problems do you deal with in that area? How quickly can you get there from your base? Have you done notable work there? What do customers in that area typically ask about?
The locksmith I mentioned at the start now has a Hitchin page that talks about the older period properties around the market square and the specific types of mortice locks they tend to have. His Letchworth page focuses on the Garden City houses with their original 1920s and 30s door hardware. Different places. Different content. Both genuine.
The technical bits
URLs that make sense
`/services/emergency-lockout/hitchin` tells an AI exactly what the page covers.
`/page-7` tells it absolutely nothing.
Keep your URLs clean, descriptive, and structured in a hierarchy that mirrors your site architecture. It sounds like a small thing. It isn't.
Schema markup
Schema is code that labels your content so machines don't have to guess. "This is a business name. This is a phone number. This is a service. This is a location."
You need:
- LocalBusiness schema on your homepage
- Service schema on each service page
- FAQPage schema on FAQ content
- BreadcrumbList schema showing your site hierarchy
Most website platforms have plugins that handle this. WordPress has several. Wix and Squarespace have built-in options. If you're on something custom, a developer can set it up in an afternoon.
The difference it makes is bloody noticeable. One client went from zero AI citations to their first recommendation within ten days of adding proper schema. Everything else on the site stayed the same.
Navigation
Three levels deep. Maximum.
1. Main sections (Services, Areas We Cover, About) 2. Specific services or locations 3. Supporting content (FAQs, guides, case studies)
If you need more depth than that for a local service business, something's gone wrong with your planning.
What if your current site is already a mess?
You don't necessarily need to start from scratch. Most sites can be retrofitted.
That means taking your existing content, splitting out pages that try to do too much, creating dedicated pages where gaps exist, adding proper internal links, implementing schema, and setting up redirects from old URLs so you don't lose whatever search presence you've built.
It's a project, not an afternoon job. But you can do it section by section. Start with your most popular service. Get that right. Move on to the next.
The only mistake is doing it halfway. A site that's partly structured and partly chaos confuses AI more than a simple site that's at least consistent.
Right then
Go look at your website. Count how many separate services or topics are crammed onto a single page. If the answer is more than one per page, you know where to start.
If you want someone to look at your site structure and tell you honestly what needs fixing, drop me a line. I do this for local businesses across Hertfordshire. You can see more about our approach on the North Hertfordshire AEO page.