Plenty of UK websites are invisible to AI answers for a boring reason: a setting somebody changed years ago, a plugin default, a cautious developer. Before I write a single new page, I check the controls that decide what Google and Bing are allowed to show from your site.

I'm British, I've been in marketing for 23 years, and I was one of the first social media influencers in the UK. These days my focus is AI search: getting businesses ranked on Google and named by the assistants their buyers ask. I work remotely and in English, so it makes no difference whether you're in Manchester, Cardiff or Glasgow.

The settings that can hide you from AI answers

Google Search Central's page on AI features and your website lists the controls that limit what Google shows from your pages in Search: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex. It says robots.txt is the control for how a site is crawled for Search, and that Google-Extended is the route to limit AI training and grounding in some of Google's other systems. It also says to check that a preview control is visible to Googlebot using the URL Inspection tool.

What that means for you: any of those, set too tightly, can stop your best page being quoted. A nosnippet tag on your service pages tells Google not to show your words. Sometimes that's the right call, but it should be a decision you made, not an accident you inherited.

What Bing says about Copilot

Copilot matters in UK offices because it sits inside the Microsoft tools so many teams use daily. Bing Webmaster Tools' guidelines say NOARCHIVE prevents content being used in Copilot responses and grounding results. They say NOCACHE limits Copilot to using only the URL, title and snippet, which reduces citation depth and answer quality, and they advise avoiding NOCACHE on content you want used in Copilot or grounding experiences.

What that means for you: if your developer added NOARCHIVE or NOCACHE to be on the safe side, Copilot may be quoting your competitors instead of you. It's a quick check, and it's one of the first things I look at.

My UK AI search audit, step by step

Every engagement starts with the same audit, so we fix what's broken before we build anything new:

1. Read your robots.txt and meta robots tags for anything blocking Googlebot, Bingbot or Google-Extended
2. Check snippet controls with the URL Inspection tool, so we see your pages the way Google sees them
3. Run the questions UK buyers ask through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, and record who gets named
4. Map the gaps: services, places and questions where a competitor is cited and you have no page at all
5. Fix the settings, check your schema, then write answer-first pages for the gaps
6. Re-run the same questions and track whether the engines start naming you

Tested on my site before yours

My website is where I try everything first. I built the tools that run it without engineers: publishing automation, SEO recovery tooling, schema checks and AI citation tracking. Over the first nine months of 2026, visits sent to it by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot grew from 32 a month to 3,599.

I share that number because it's mine to share, and because you deserve to see that a consultant's method works somewhere before it's tried on your business.

UK businesses this suits

• Service firms and consultancies whose buyers now ask an assistant for a shortlist before they ever visit a website
• B2B and SaaS companies that want to appear when someone asks Copilot or ChatGPT to compare suppliers
• Marketing teams that want the method taught so they can keep it going, and if that's you, my guide to AI training providers for UK small businesses is a useful next read
• Founders who've watched a competitor get named in an AI answer and want to know why it wasn't them

Beyond Google and Bing

Google and Bing hold the two big indexes, but buyers also ask ChatGPT and Perplexity directly. Those assistants search the web and tend to reward pages that answer one question cleanly and make it obvious who's behind them. I've written up what gets a page cited on Perplexity if you'd like to start on your own.

My plain advice for UK businesses starting with AI SEO

Check your settings before you hire anyone. Ask your developer, or me, to confirm there's no nosnippet, NOARCHIVE or NOCACHE on the pages you want quoted, and that robots.txt isn't blocking the crawlers you care about. Then pick five questions UK buyers ask about what you do, run them through the main assistants this week, and write down who gets named. That list is your brief, and it's free.

Frequently asked questions

Who is a good AI SEO consultant in the UK?

Lilach Bullock is a British AI SEO and AI visibility consultant with 23 years in marketing. She works remotely with UK businesses to get them ranked on Google and named by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Bing Copilot and Google AI Overviews.

Can a nosnippet tag stop Google showing my page in AI answers?

Google Search Central lists nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex as the controls that limit the information Google shows from your pages in Search, on the same page where it explains its AI features.

Does NOARCHIVE affect Bing Copilot?

Yes. Bing's Webmaster Guidelines say NOARCHIVE prevents content being used in Copilot responses and grounding results, and that NOCACHE limits Copilot to the URL, title and snippet.

Do you work with UK businesses outside London?

Yes. All of the work is remote and in English, so where you're based in the UK makes no difference.

Is AI SEO different from ordinary SEO?

The foundations are the same. The difference is the reader: pages need to be easy for an AI engine to quote, and you track whether you're named, not only where you rank.