How to get your business recommended by AI

The short version

AI engines answering local questions are, for the most part, reading the same evidence Google has always read: your Business Profile, your reviews, your website, and what other sites say about you. There is no separate AI index you can submit to. The work is mostly familiar; what has changed is which parts of it matter most.

Two things now matter much more than they used to: having a clear, specific answer written down somewhere a machine can read it, and consistency across sources. Models synthesise from several places at once, so a contradiction between your website and your listing does not average out — it makes you a risky thing to recommend, and the model names someone less ambiguous instead.

1. Google Business Profile, completely filled in

This is not a tie-breaker, it is the foundation. For local questions it is the single richest structured source about you that exists, and a half-finished profile is the most common reason a real business gets skipped.

• Every service listed by name. Not “plumbing” but “emergency leak repair, boiler installation, bathroom fitting”. Models match on specifics, and people ask in specifics.
• Hours, including holiday hours. A profile that has not been touched in two years starts to read as abandoned.
• The category, chosen precisely. The primary category does an enormous amount of work. “Restaurant” competes with everything; “Vietnamese restaurant” competes with four.
• Photos with recent dates, and posts occasionally. Both are liveness signals.

2. Reviews — recency and substance, not just the average

A 4.9 from three years ago loses to a 4.6 from last month. Recency reads as evidence the business is trading and the experience is current.

What is genuinely different in the AI era is that the text of reviews is being read, not just counted. A model asked for “the best place for a quiet lunch meeting” can only name you if somebody, somewhere, wrote words to that effect about you. You cannot write those words yourself — but you can ask satisfied customers what they came in for, and people tend to answer that in their reviews.

Reply to reviews, including the bad ones. A calm, specific reply to a complaint is often the text a model quotes when someone asks whether a business handles problems well.

3. Say what you do in plain sentences on your own site

Most small business websites describe what they do in a way that is impossible to quote. A hero image with the word “Excellence” over it contains no extractable fact.

Put these somewhere in readable text, not inside an image or a PDF:

• What you do, in the words customers use, not industry terms.
• Where you are, written out as a full address.
• Your hours, as text on the page.
• What makes you different, as a concrete claim rather than an adjective — “open until midnight on weekends” beats “convenient”.
• Answers to the questions customers actually phone up and ask. These get quoted almost verbatim.

Add LocalBusiness structured data with your address, hours and phone. It is not magic, but it removes ambiguity, and ambiguity is what gets you skipped.

4. Be consistent everywhere

Name, address and phone number, identical across your site, Google, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp and any trade directory you are listed in. An old suite number on one aggregator is enough to make a model hedge or pick the competitor whose details agree with themselves.

This is unglamorous and it is the highest-yield afternoon most local businesses can spend.

5. Get mentioned somewhere that is not yours

Models weight independent corroboration heavily. A local paper, a “best of” roundup, a supplier’s customer page, a chamber of commerce listing, a genuine partnership with a nearby business — each is a source that says you exist and are worth naming, written by someone with nothing to gain.

One local roundup post you are named in is worth more than a month of posting on your own channels.

What does not work

• Keyword stuffing your business name.“Joe’s Plumbing | Best Emergency Plumber Manchester” violates Google’s naming rules, risks suspension, and reads as spam to a model summarising you.
• Buying reviews. Detectable, removable, and a fast route to a filtered profile that helps nobody.
• Paying for “AI submission”. There is no submission endpoint. Nobody can place you in a ChatGPT answer.
• Hidden text aimed at models. Instructions buried in white-on-white text are the 2004 playbook with a new coat of paint, and carry the same penalties.

Then check whether any of it worked

This is the part almost everyone skips. Every item above is a hypothesis until you go and ask the engine what it says about you now. Run the audit in how to check what AI says about your business before you change anything, so you have a baseline, and again six weeks later.

If you would rather not diarise that, AI Business Monitor runs the same questions weekly and emails you when the answer moves, including when a competitor starts being named in your place.