How do I get recommended
The new Siri is out. What should my local business do about it?
Answered by Ryan, RankNext strategist · Updated July 2, 2026
The short answer
Three moves, this quarter: welcome Apple's crawlers (Applebot and Applebot-Extended — most sites block them by accident), claim and complete your Apple Business Connect listing so Apple Maps has your real data, and make your site's facts machine-readable. The new Siri answers from Apple's index, and almost no local business is optimizing for it yet.
Why this moment is unusual
Apple shipped the rebuilt Siri at WWDC in June 2026: conversational, context-aware, and answering from the web through Apple Intelligence. It ships by default on the majority of American phones. And yet the prevailing advice on the web for two years has been to block Applebot-Extended — so a large share of businesses have opted out of Apple's answer layer without ever deciding to.
Early, readable, consistent signals get learned first. The businesses whose sites welcome Apple's crawler and whose Apple Maps data is complete are the ones the new Siri can confidently name while everyone else is still invisible to it.
The concrete checklist
One: robots.txt explicitly allows Applebot and Applebot-Extended (check yours — a security plugin may have decided for you). Two: claim Apple Business Connect, set exact categories, hours, service area, photos; align it letter-for-letter with your Google profile. Three: LocalBusiness schema and plain-HTML pages so the facts parse cleanly. Four: keep the review engine running — trust signals transfer across ecosystems.
We've folded Siri-readiness into every client's monthly system and published the full mechanics on our Siri engine page. The free check includes whether Apple's crawlers can read you today.
Check it yourself, free
robots.txt Generator
Allow the AI crawlers that matter (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended), block the rest.