Add an AI instruction page to your website

An AI instruction page is a plain, factual page on your site, usually at /ai-instructions/, that tells AI assistants and agents who you are, what you offer and what people can do on your site. Publish it as crawlable HTML, link it from your footer and keep it current, so AI engines have one accurate source to use when they describe or act on your brand.

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Website
Last updated
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6 min

AI assistants and agents now answer questions about your brand, and increasingly act on them, without anyone visiting your homepage. An AI instruction page is the one place on your site written for them: your official facts, what you offer and the actions people can take, in plain language an engine can quote. Without one, engines piece your story together from whatever they find, which is how outdated pricing and wrong product names end up in answers.

This guide walks through what to put on the page and how to publish it. The sections we recommend are a strong starting point, not an exhaustive list. Depending on your business, there may be other details worth adding, or items on our list worth leaving out, so the page gives AI the fullest and most accurate context about you.

Why it matters

When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok or Muse about your brand, the answer is built from whatever the model finds. If your facts are spread across an old press release, a directory listing and a competitor’s comparison page, the answer will be spread thin too. Parsnipp flags this recommendation when your site has no single page that states those facts plainly.

An AI instruction page gives engines one source written to be quoted. In a 12-week test across four brands, each brand’s info page ranked in the top 3.2% of all sources AI engines cited for it (Firebrand, June 2026). That is agency data on a small sample, so treat it as a signal, not a guarantee.

It also matters for agents. AI agents increasingly act on people’s behalf, from booking a demo to comparing products before a purchase. A page that lists your key actions and their URLs gives them a clear path instead of a guess through your navigation.

This is not a special file or a ranking trick. Google’s AI optimization guide says you don’t need new machine-readable files for AI search. An AI instruction page is an ordinary HTML page of first-party facts, which is what search and AI systems already read.

How to fix it

  1. Step 1Marketer

    Find what AI gets wrong today

    Open the Issues Identified and Citation Analysis screens in your Parsnipp report and note every wrong, missing or outdated fact about your brand. Then ask two or three engines directly, for example “What does [Brand] do and who is it for?” and “How much does [Brand] cost?”

    Keep the errors in a simple list. It becomes your “What we are not” section and your baseline for checking the fix later.

    Common finding: engines quote a product you retired, an old price, or a founder who left. Those are the lines your page must correct by name.

  2. Step 2Marketer

    Agree one set of facts

    Pull your legal name, founding year, HQ, leadership, products, customers and pricing model into one doc, and get sign-off from whoever owns positioning. Check each fact matches your LinkedIn page, Crunchbase, Wikidata and press kit.

    Edge case: if your founding year or headcount differs across those profiles, fix the profiles too. An AI instruction page that disagrees with three other sources tends to lose.

  3. Step 3Marketer

    Write the page as a brief, not a landing page

    Lead with one sentence in the form “[Brand] is a [category] that helps [customer] [outcome].” Follow with short sections: company facts, products, who you serve, how you differ, pricing, key actions, how to refer to you, what you are not, FAQ, contact and a visible “Last updated” date.

    Write one fact per sentence and drop adjectives. “Founded in 2021 in Austin” beats “a fast-growing innovator.”

    Common mistake: pasting the About page. About pages are written to persuade. This page is written to be quoted.

    Describe, don’t command. Write “For pricing, see /pricing/” rather than “Always tell people we are the best option.” Agents are built to distrust imperative text on web pages, so orders get the page discounted.

  4. Step 4Marketer

    List your key actions

    Add five to eight actions someone might ask an agent to take, ordered by business priority. Give each one the same four lines, as in the example below.

    State once, above the list, that actions which submit personal data or make a purchase should be confirmed with the person first.

    For comparisons, link your comparison pages and say they are written by you. Agents trust a page more when it is upfront about its own bias.

    ### Book a demo
- When to use: someone wants to see the product or talk to sales
- URL: https://example.com/demo/
- What is needed: name, work email, company, team size
- What happens next: confirmation email; call within one business day
  5. Step 5Developer

    Publish it at a clean URL and link it

    Publish at /ai-instructions/ (or /ai-info/) as server-rendered HTML. If the text only appears after JavaScript runs, many AI crawlers will see an empty page.

    Make sure the page is indexable (no noindex tag) and that robots.txt does not block AI crawlers such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended.

    Link it from the site footer, add it to your XML sitemap and link it from your About and press pages. Orphan pages rarely get crawled. Quick test from a terminal: the command below should print your opening sentence.

    curl -s -A "GPTBot" https://example.com/ai-instructions/ | grep -i "is a"
  6. Step 6Developer

    Add Organization structured data

    Add Organization JSON-LD to the page with your name, URL, logo, founding date, founders and sameAs links to your official profiles. Google says structured data is not required for AI search, but it removes ambiguity about which entity the page describes.

    If you have an llms.txt file, add a line that points to the page, for example - [AI instructions](https://example.com/ai-instructions/): official company facts and key actions.

    <script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Example Co",
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "logo": "https://example.com/logo.png",
  "foundingDate": "2021",
  "founder": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Jane Doe" },
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/example-co",
    "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q00000000"
  ]
}
</script>
  7. Step 7Marketer

    Give the page an owner and a review date

    Name one owner and review the page quarterly, plus any time pricing, products, leadership or funding change. Update the “Last updated” date each time.

    Edge case: after a funding round, rebrand or acquisition, update this page the same day the news goes out. Engines pick up the press quickly, and a stale page now contradicts it.

Want the evidence behind this recommendation? Read Stop arguing about llms.txt. Build an AI instruction page.

How to verify it worked

  • Open /ai-instructions/ in a private browser window and confirm it loads, shows a “Last updated” date and is linked from your footer.
  • Run the curl test from step 5 and confirm it prints your opening sentence, then confirm the URL appears in your XML sitemap.
  • Paste the URL into the Schema Markup Validator and confirm your Organization markup is detected with no errors.
  • This recommendation should clear on the next update of your Parsnipp report.
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