AI search visibility for companies in Germany

Why AI assistants skip some companies

An assistant can only name a company whose pages it can fetch and read. Google states that a page needs no special optimization to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: it must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. Google advises keeping important content in text form and structured data in line with the visible text (Google, updated December 10, 2025).

The other assistants read pages through crawlers of their own. The crawlers of OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity do not run JavaScript, while Google’s Gemini uses Googlebot, which does (Vercel, December 17, 2024). A service list that a script loads after the page arrives stays invisible to ChatGPT and visible to Gemini.

A top position in Google counts for less in AI Overviews than in the classic results. In March 2026, Ahrefs found across 863,000 keywords that 38 percent of the pages cited in AI Overviews ranked in Google’s top 10 for the same query, down from 76 percent in July 2025 (Search Engine Journal, March 2, 2026). A page that answers a narrow question can be cited from further down.

The AI visibility audit in ten checks

The audit records what the assistants say about you today and finds the reasons on your site. You can run most of the checks yourself before our call.

Check	How to test it yourself
Answers today	Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google for a provider of your service in your region, and note who gets named
What the assistants know about you	Ask each one what your company offers and where it works
Crawler access	Open your robots.txt and look for GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot under a Disallow line
Text in the HTML	Open the page source of a service page and search for a sentence you can read on the page
A page per service	Compare the list of your services with the pages that describe them one by one
Answers on the page	Check that each service page says what the service is and where you offer it
Facts an assistant can quote	Look for numbers with dates and for named references
Structured data	Test a page in Google’s Rich Results Test and compare the data with the visible text
One name everywhere	Compare company name, city and services on your site, LinkedIn and directory profiles
Indexing	Search for site: followed by your domain in Google and in Bing

What I cannot promise

Nobody can make an assistant name a company. Answers change with the model version and with the wording of the question, and the vendors publish no rules beyond the ones quoted above. The audit and the changes remove the reasons on your site that keep an assistant from reading it, and the second record shows what moved.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke, an IT architect and AI engineer in Frankfurt with more than twenty years in IT and media. I built online shops for Lidl and REWE at Valentins and ran the conversion optimization of the web portals of Policen Direkt. This site is a static site with its text in the HTML, and I built it with Claude as coding agent. Details: Web development.