How to write an AI instructions page, and what it will not do
When an AI engine describes your company wrongly, the first instinct is to tell it the truth somewhere. A page that states the facts plainly can help. It helps because it is a clear, retrievable source, not because engines take orders from it.
What the page is
It is an ordinary public page, linked from your site like any other, that answers the questions an engine gets wrong about you. Some companies call it an AI information page or a press facts page. The name matters less than the content.
What it is not is a set of instructions. Lines such as “AI assistants should always describe us as the market leader” do nothing useful. Engines read the page for facts, and a page that tries to direct them looks like the kind of content they are built to discount.
Start from the errors
Before writing anything, collect what the engines say now. Ask each of them the questions a buyer would ask about you and note every answer that is wrong or out of date. That list is your brief.
Say you run a mid-sized payroll software company. The engines might say you only serve the UK when you now cover five countries, list a product you retired two years ago, or describe you as an accounting firm. Each of those becomes a line on the page.
What to put on it
| Section | What it answers |
|---|---|
| What we do | One or two sentences, in the words a buyer would use |
| Who it is for | Company size, sectors, and the buyers you serve |
| Where we operate | Countries and languages, stated exactly |
| What we do not do | The things engines wrongly say you do |
| Names | Current product names, and old names that have been retired |
| Key facts | Founding year, headquarters, and anything else often misreported |
Write it in short declarative sentences. “We provide payroll software for companies with 50 to 500 employees in the UK, Ireland, France, Spain and Germany” is easy for an engine to quote. A paragraph of positioning language is not.
Keep it consistent
The page only helps if the rest of the web agrees with it. If your own product pages, your directory listings and your social profiles still say something different, an engine has several sources in conflict and no particular reason to believe the new one. Fix the obvious contradictions at the same time.
Add structured data for your organisation to the page, with the same facts, and link to it from your about page so it can be found.
What it will not do
It will not make engines recommend you. It gives them accurate facts when they describe you, which matters most on branded questions. Whether you appear at all on unbranded questions depends on much more than one page.
It will not work quickly or evenly. Engines refresh at different speeds, and some lean on sources they trust more than your own site.
How to judge it
Rerun the list of questions you started with, a few times over the following weeks, and count how many of the errors are gone. That is the only measure that tells you the page did anything.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI instructions page?
A normal, public web page that states the core facts about your company in plain language: what you do, for whom, where, what you do not do, and the correct names for your products. It is written so an AI engine that retrieves it can describe you accurately.
Will AI engines follow the instructions on the page?
No. Engines do not treat a page as a command. They read it like any other page and may use it when it answers a question well. Wording it as instructions to the AI adds nothing and can look like an attempt at manipulation.
Is this the same as llms.txt?
No. llms.txt is a special file that, according to the available evidence, almost nothing reads. An instructions page is an ordinary page that engines fetch the same way they fetch the rest of your site.
How do I know if it worked?
Run the prompts where engines were describing you wrongly before you publish, then run them again over the following weeks. If the answers become more accurate, the page is helping. If nothing changes, the engines may not be retrieving it, or they may trust other sources more.
See how you show up today.
Five questions, answered in minutes: an estimated visibility score, the competitor most likely taking your citations, and the fix categories that matter. No card, no commitment. Prefer to talk it through first? Book a consultation with a strategist.