5 steps to get your local business recommended by AI search

When someone asks ChatGPT for “a good plumber near me,” it doesn’t hand back ten blue links. It names a handful of businesses, and most people start with those. If yours isn’t one of them, you aren’t in the running for that customer.

The signals AI assistants rely on are ones a small business can influence. Here’s where to start.

Why AI search matters for local businesses

Fewer people click through to websites, and the ones who do arrive further along in their decision. For a local business, that makes being named in the answer the part that counts. It also has to hold up: BrightLocal found that 88% of people who use AI for recommendations check them, for example by looking at the source or making sure reviews are genuine.

1. Make sure AI assistants can read your website

When ChatGPT first launched, many site owners blocked AI crawlers because they didn’t want AI “using” their content. Some of those blocks are still in place, and today they can keep a business out of AI answers altogether.

AI companies run separate crawlers for search and for training. The search crawlers decide whether you can be found:

• OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in ChatGPT search. OpenAI says sites that opt out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
• Claude-SearchBot indexes pages for Claude’s search results.
• PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity’s answers.
• Googlebot crawls for Google Search, which Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on.

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt to see what you’re blocking. Our robots.txt guide walks through every line to look for.

Two more things quietly hide a site from AI: important details that exist only inside images or PDFs, and pages that show no text until a login or a lot of JavaScript has run. Put your services, service area, hours and contact details in plain text on the page.

2. Format your content so AI can quote it

AI assistants answer a specific question by pulling the relevant passage out of a page. A long, dense page makes that hard, and a whitepaper tucked inside a PDF makes it harder.

The fix is to chunk your content: break a long page into short sections that each cover one idea, question or service. Every section should make sense and deliver value on its own, even if someone reads only that part.

• Lead with the answer. Put the direct answer in the first sentence of a section, then the detail.
• Use your customers’ questions as headings. “How much does a water heater replacement cost?” beats “Pricing.”
• Add an FAQ that answers the questions you hear on the phone every week.
• Add structured data. Schema.org markup such as LocalBusiness and FAQPage states your name, address, phone number, hours and service area in a form software reads reliably.

3. Collect reviews where AI actually looks

Google reviews still matter for Google’s own AI features and for customers who check them. But according to Local Falcon, ChatGPT has no direct integration with your Google Business Profile. It leans on sources such as Bing Places for Business, directories and review sites like Yelp, Tripadvisor and the BBB, and Facebook Pages.

When Whitespark studied 153 local searches across 17 business categories, Facebook was the most common review source on Bing Places listings, followed by Yelp. Sites like Porch, Angi and Yellow Pages stood out in particular trades. Which platforms matter depends on your category, so look at where businesses like yours collect reviews.

• Claim and complete your Bing Places, Yelp and Facebook listings, not just Google.
• Ask happy customers to review you on the platform that matters most in your category.
• Reply to reviews, good and bad. It shows a real business is listening.

Assistants also pick up what people say about a business in public discussions, such as Reddit threads asking for recommendations.

4. Publish genuinely helpful content, often

AI assistants lean toward recent information. Ahrefs found that the pages AI assistants cite are, on average, 25.7% fresher than the pages ranking in Google’s regular results, and ChatGPT showed the strongest preference for newer content. A page you haven’t touched in years is at a disadvantage.

• Be helpful, not promotional. Explain how to tell if a water heater is failing, rather than announcing a sale.
• Use your customers’ words. “My AC is blowing warm air,” not “HVAC performance diagnostics.”
• Keep it current. Update service pages when prices, services or hours change, and show the date.

Your website isn’t the only place this counts. Across 30 million sources, Peec AI found Reddit was the most-cited domain in AI answers, followed by YouTube and LinkedIn. And since July 10, 2025, public posts from professional Instagram accounts can appear in Google and Bing search results (PPC Land). A short how-to video or a genuinely useful post keeps working long after you publish it.

5. Be the consistent answer, and start now

AI assistants summarize what many sources say. When your website, listings, reviews and community mentions all describe your business the same way (who you are, what you do best, and where), you become an easier answer to give with confidence.

Those signals add up over time, so the best time to start is before your competitors do.

• Use exactly the same business name, address, phone number and hours everywhere.
• Pick the specialties you want to be known for, like “emergency water heater repair,” and describe them the same way on every profile.
• Keep adding fresh reviews and helpful content, so the picture stays current.

No one can guarantee a recommendation, and AI answers change from one run to the next. That’s why it pays to measure rather than guess: ask the questions your customers ask, several times each, and see how often your business is named.