How it works
When your customer asks AI instead of Google
Three things have to be in place before an AI assistant can put your business in front of a customer. You set up all three without writing any code.
Step 1
Get listed
Assistants look businesses up in directories built for machines rather than people.
Your business needs an entry in one of them — published at your own web address, and written to be read by a machine rather than a person. Turning that into a published entry, and keeping it valid as the standard moves, is what the platform does with what you enter.
Industry analysis: inside a live AI directory
Every shelf in there is stocked by developers, for developers. The empty row is not an oversight — an ordinary business has no software to connect and nobody to connect it, so there has been no practical route in. That is the route the platform gives you. This is one directory rather than the whole ecosystem, but it is the kind an assistant reaches for. What the setup does- You describe your business; the platform builds and publishes the entry
- We keep it current as the standard changes
- Publishing at your own web address is what lets an assistant check you are real
Without it: Without an entry there is nothing for an assistant to consider.
How publishing works →Step 2
Describe your business
The assistant matches what the customer asked against what your entry says.
“Consultancy services since 1998” matches nothing, because nobody asks for that. What works is naming the work you actually take on, who it is for, where you do it, and the questions people arrive with. This is the part that decides most outcomes, so the setup is built around drawing it out of you.
Same business, same capability — the second entry just describes the work in the words the customer used. The setup walks you through writing that second version. The example is a trade because it is easy to picture; it works the same for a consultancy, a clinic or a supplier. What the setup does- The setup turns what you enter into wording that matches how people ask
- You can update it whenever you learn what customers actually ask for
Without it: A vague entry is listed and still never matches.
Step 3
Serve your customers
The assistant leaves the directory and comes to your business with the customer's question.
Now your business has to be able to answer it — at any hour, on a day when nobody is at a desk. That means knowing the work you take on and the work you turn down, roughly what a job like this involves, where you operate, and what you need to establish before you can price anything. It is knowledge you already have; it has just never been written down anywhere something else could use it.
What the setup does- The setup turns your know-how into something that can talk a customer through it
- We run it and keep it answering, around the clock
Without it: Being chosen only counts if the customer then gets somewhere.
See what that looks like in practice →
The standard behind it
Built on an open standard, not our own format
This runs on Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) — an open specification published in 2026 by Google, Microsoft and Hugging Face, developed with Cisco, Databricks, GitHub, GoDaddy, Nvidia, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Snowflake. It defines how a business publishes what it can do at its own web address, and how an assistant searches across everything published that way.
Two things follow from that. Your entry sits at your own web address, so it is your business's own record rather than a profile on someone else's platform. And because the format is open, any agent finder that reads the standard can pick it up — you are published once, not once per platform. Keeping up with a specification that is still moving is our job.
Read the full explainer on ARD →Straight answers
This is early. Here is what that means before you decide.
ARD is an open specification that lets an AI assistant ask “what is available for this task?” and get back matching businesses and services before it commits to anything. A business publishes what it can do at its own web address, and agent finders index it from there. It is a way of being found rather than a way of being run — the assistant still contacts your business directly once it has found you. It is worth knowing that it is still a draft: version 0.9, published as a proposal in 2026 and actively being worked on. Keeping your entry valid as it changes is part of what we do.
They are the first step of the same shift. Generative engine optimization and answer engine optimization are about the text an assistant says about you — getting listed or mentioned. That is real work and it matters. What this adds is the step after: your business becomes something the assistant can act on, so it can ask a question and get a real answer back instead of just describing you.
Read our explainer on generative engine optimization →No. As far as we can see — and we check regularly — there is no continuously updated, production-grade directory that assistants reach for yet. What works today is narrower: we publish your business into a register that current agent finders appear to draw on. That is a real route and, as best we can tell, the only one there is right now. It also runs on observation rather than agreement: nobody has committed to keep reading that register.
No. Being in it makes you findable; it cannot make an assistant choose you. That comes down to how well your entry matches what was asked, which is why describing the business properly matters more than the listing itself. And when you see a relevance number beside a result, it means one thing only: how closely the entry matched the question. It is not a review, not a quality score and not a safety check.
It is the plain-English name for a directory an AI assistant searches when it needs to find a business or service for a customer. Instead of a page of links for a person to read, it holds structured entries a machine can match against a question. Fugentic publishes your business into one on your behalf, so getting in is not something you have to work out yourself.
Not yet. What your business can do today is describe itself properly, talk a customer through what they need, and start the next step — an inquiry, a quote request, a booking request. Quoting against your live prices, holding a slot in your actual calendar and taking payment are not things we support today; they need capabilities we have not built. We are working towards them in that order.
Look at the analysis further up the page: what is querying these directories today is overwhelmingly business tools and other software. So the earliest real demand sits in business-to-business and agent-to-agent, and that is where we expect the first results. A consumer assistant sending you an inquiry unprompted is where this is heading, and it depends on consumer platforms opening up, which is not in our hands. Getting set up now is about being there before that happens.
What you already know about your business — the work you take on, the work you turn down, where you operate, and what you need to know before you can price something. You enter it through a guided setup. Plus your own web address. No software, no API and nobody technical. Everything else the entry needs, including the details that let an assistant verify you are who you say you are, we sort out as part of setting it up.
Find out where your business stands
It takes what you already know about your business. No code, no software to install, and nothing to migrate.