How wineries and wine suppliers get recommended by AI assistants
How ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot choose which wineries and suppliers to recommend, and the practical steps that make your business easy to recommend.
AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot recommend the businesses they can describe with confidence. For a winery or a wine industry supplier, that comes down to five things: a website the assistants are allowed to read, the same facts about you everywhere online, pages that answer questions directly, mentions from sources they trust, and a strong position in ordinary search, which many assistants use when they look things up live.
How AI assistants find businesses
Assistants draw on two sources. The first is what they learned in training, which is broad and a little out of date. The second is live web search, which several assistants run when a question needs current or local answers, drawing on search indexes such as Google’s and Bing’s.
That second source is good news. It means the work that helps you rank in search also helps you get recommended, and it means Bing, which many businesses overlook, now matters as much as Google.
1. Let the assistants read your website
When I check why a business is missing from AI answers, the cause is often simple: the site blocks the crawlers the assistants use. Some hosting and security services now block AI crawlers by default, and many owners never know it’s switched on.
Check three places: your robots.txt file, your hosting or security settings, and any firewall rules. Then add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools as well as Google Search Console, so both indexes have your pages.
2. Keep your facts identical everywhere
Assistants cross-check. If your website, your Google Business Profile and three directories give different opening hours or descriptions, the assistant trusts none of them. Make these match everywhere:
- Business name, address and contact details
- What you do, in one consistent sentence
- Opening hours and booking details, for wineries
- Products, capacities and markets served, for suppliers
3. Write pages that answer questions directly
Assistants lift clear answers. The pages they use most tend to share a pattern: the answer in the first paragraph, one topic per page, clear headings, and facts that make sense on their own. An FAQ section with real questions from your customers, such as whether you ship abroad or what your minimum order is, gives them exactly what they need.
Structured data helps too. It labels your business, products, events and FAQs in a format machines read reliably.
4. Earn mentions from trusted sources
Assistants give weight to what others say about you. For wineries, that means regional wine associations, tourism boards, wine guides and the local press. For suppliers, it means trade associations, trade press, show exhibitor lists and case studies published by your winery clients.
5. Give them a summary: llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed format: a short text file at the root of your site that summarises who you are and lists your key pages. Not every assistant reads it yet, but it takes an hour to write and sets out your business exactly as you’d like it described. This site has one at /llms.txt.
How to test where you stand
Ask the assistants the questions your customers ask, in the words they’d use:
| For a winery | For a supplier |
|---|---|
| “Best wineries to visit near (your town)” | “Who makes (your product) for wineries in (your country)” |
| “Where can I buy (your grape) from (your region)” | “Recommend a (your product) supplier for a small winery” |
| “Is (your winery) open on Sundays” | “What does (your company) offer wineries” |
Note whether you appear, what’s said about you, and which sources are cited. Repeat every few months to see what’s changed.
Where to start
- Check your robots.txt and hosting settings for blocked AI crawlers
- Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools
- Make your name, description and details identical on your site and your Google Business Profile
- Ask three assistants the questions above and note the results
For wineries, my guide to SEO for wineries covers the search side in detail. If you’d like to know where you stand today, a marketing audit includes your visibility in AI assistants.