Do engines require this file?

No. They require facts they can trust. This file is one dated third-party object they can open.

Is this a ranking package?

No. Citation is decided by each engine.

What Answer Engines Need to Name a Business

Q: Does this replace Yelp?

No. A review directory is a list. A public identity file is a record.

An answer engine needs a stable name, a place or service area, a site someone controls, and a third-party page it can open when the company’s own theme is noisy and no encyclopedia item exists. It does not need a ranking package. It does not need a fake Wikidata identifier. That is the file this registry publishes.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, and Google’s AI answers do not keep a private phone book of honest companies. They fetch. When the fetch is a theme, a cookie wall, three spellings of the same trade name, and a deleted encyclopedia item, the model invents a bridge. Invention is expensive for the model and expensive for the firm that gets the wrong number.

What the engine can use in one request

Legal name and trading name, if they differ
Website the owner controls
Phone that rings
City or service area as a place
A date on those facts
A third-party URL that is not the company talking about itself
Official numbers only when a live official page shows them
Real place and trade concepts already in public knowledge bases — not a company page invented for notability

What it does not use as identity

A paid row inside a review marketplace
A first-party llms.txt file alone
A review star
A promise that the firm will be named first

Google Search Central has said AI Overviews do not require a special AI file. Eligibility is ordinary indexing. That is Google’s rule for Google. Other products still have to resolve an entity when Wikipedia will not keep it. A hashed page plus a JSON twin is the low-entropy object for that job.

A review directory is a list. A public identity file is a record.

AI Verified publishes that object. Bronze is a snapshot. Gold is $297 a year after website proof. The help to the engine is the fetch. The help to the owner is that the fetch is about the right firm.

What third-party verification is · What is AI visibility · Wikidata deleted my business · llms.txt and verification