Ask ChatGPT for a good plumber nearby, and you’ll get a handful of names. Maybe three, maybe five. Those businesses get phone calls. Everyone else might as well be invisible.
More customers are skipping the traditional search results page and going straight to AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude for recommendations. So, the question we keep hearing from small business owners is pretty simple: how do I get named in that answer?
A recent study ran more than 31,000 local-intent prompts across those four engines and looked at what the recommended businesses had in common. The same factors surfaced on every platform, and other research lines up with the findings.
Here’s what matters and are some things you can work on:
Make Your Listing the Source of Truth
AI tools don’t guess about your business. They pull from records they consider reliable, and your Google Business Profile sits near the top. Profiles with the category, services, photos, and description all filled in were about 70% more likely to appear in AI recommendations.
A few details carry more weight than you’d expect:
- Verify your Maps listing. A claimed profile isn’t the same as one tied to a confirmed Maps location. These signals now make up roughly 36% of local pack ranking weight.
- Keep your hours accurate. Some AI search features read hours in real time to answer questions like “who’s open late tonight.” Wrong hours can get you skipped entirely.
- Match your name, address, and phone number everywhere. Your website, Google, Yelp, Facebook, and industry directories should all match. Even small differences, like “Suite 2” on one and “Ste 2” on another, can make an AI tool hesitate.
Give AI Something Clear to Read
Your website’s on-page optimization should explain who you are and what you do in plain terms. Page titles that name the service and the location help. So does schema markup (LocalBusiness, FAQ, and service types in particular), which spells out your details in a format that machines can read directly. Sites using it get crawled by AI noticeably more often.
How you write matters also. Pages that open with a direct answer outperform ones filled with general marketing language. A page called “Emergency Plumbing in [Your City]” that says what you do, when you’re available, and how fast you respond beats a page about “quality service you can count on.” Q&A sections and clear headings make a difference, too.
It also pays to cover more than one way of asking. One person types “best roofer in Tampa,” another asks “who does roof repair near me.” A single brand’s AI visibility can swing more than 4.5 times across closely related topics, so building around one keyword leaves a lot on the table.
Get People Talking About You
Reviews are one of the fastest-growing ranking signals, now around 20% of local ranking weight, up from 16% two years ago. A steady stream beats a one-time batch, and replying to your reviews matters. Specific, thoughtful responses signal credibility. A copy-and-paste “Thanks!” doesn’t do much.
Beyond reviews, mentions on other sites carry real weight. One large analysis found brand mentions predicted AI citations about three times more strongly than backlinks, even when the mention didn’t include a link. Local directories, community discussions, news coverage, event sponsorships: every place your name shows up adds to the picture.
Stay Consistent Over Time
There’s no overnight fix here. New, thin profiles are harder to find, and AI visibility builds over months. These tools also favor recent content, pulling from the past year about 65% of the time. Each new blog post was tied to roughly a 7% bump in AI crawler visits, and each new website page about 4%. Businesses that keep building their presence pull ahead of those that set things up once and walk away.
What this Looks Like in Practice
We recently started working with a kitchen and bath remodeler in the Tampa Bay area. Their reputation was strong offline, with a 4.9-star rating across more than 100 Google reviews, but their website was hard to find. Three of the seven local search terms we tracked didn’t show up anywhere in the top 100 results.
We started with the fundamentals covered above: rewriting page titles and meta descriptions around specific services and the city, adding schema markup, cleaning up image alt text, and building Q&A content around questions homeowners actually ask. We also added an llms.txt file, a newer format meant to help AI tools make sense of a site.
Four months in:
- A broad “home services” search in their city went from outside the top 100 to #6 on Google and the top spot on Bing.
- Searches for kitchen remodeling and home improvement both climbed from nowhere into the top 30.
- Month over month, their Google search impressions grew 28%, and clicks rose 35%.
Not every term moves in a straight line. A couple slipped a few spots that month, and bathroom remodeling is still a work in progress. That’s normal, and it’s the “stay consistent over time” point playing out in real life. Progress builds month after month, not overnight.
The Bottom Line
You don’t need to figure out which AI tool your customers prefer. The fundamentals hold across all of them: a complete, verified profile, accurate details everywhere, pages that answer real questions, a steady flow of reviews and mentions, and some patience.
Curious how your business shows up when someone asks AI for a recommendation? My Marketing Department can analyze where you stand so you can stop wondering. Give us a call at 727-888-1200.