More and more often, the first question about where to buy something is not typed into a search box. It is put to an AI assistant: where can I get an oat milk latte near me? The assistant answers with a name, and the shops it doesn't name are not in the conversation.
An assistant can only recommend what it can read. Before it will name your business, it has to be able to do three things with your site.
Read it
If your menu is a photo or a PDF, or your prices only appear once someone starts an order, there is nothing there for an agent to read. What you sell and what it costs should be on the page as text, on a page of its own, at an address that doesn't change.
Understand it
An agent is answering a specific question: is it open now, is it close by, does it have the thing. So the plain facts have to be stated plainly. Hours for each day. An address for each location, on that location's own page. Items sorted the way your kind of business sorts them, whether those are menu sections, departments or collections.
Trust it
Out-of-date facts are how a site loses that trust: hours that disagree between two pages, a menu from two seasons ago, a link that goes nowhere. The simplest way to stay current is to have one source for the facts. If your catalog comes from your point of sale, the site says what the register says.
If you are rebuilding
A new site should not cost you the standing the old one earned. Keep the old addresses working by redirecting each one to its new page, so bookmarks, links from other sites and search rankings carry over. And keep the current site up until the new one is ready on your domain.
Where Vero comes in
AI Builder builds your site from a few details about your business: its name, what kind of business it is, your address and your hours. Your address and phone are shown on every page, what kind of business you are is published in the form search engines read, and for a store the catalog comes from your point of sale. See how AI Builder works.