A customer tells you they found you by asking ChatGPT for a recommendation. Or the opposite happens: you ask Gemini to suggest a business like yours in your area, and it names three others and not you. Either way, you are left wondering how these assistants decide who to mention, and whether there is anything you can do about it.
There is no setting or file that makes an assistant recommend you. But the way these tools gather information is understood well enough to say what helps, what does not, and what is a waste of money.
Where these assistants get their information
Assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini draw on two broad kinds of information, and it helps to keep them separate.
What the model learned in training. The underlying language model is trained on a very large body of text, much of it from the public web. What it “knows” from training is fixed at the point training finished, so it can be out of date, and it is fuzzy on small details such as a local business’s opening hours. A well-known business may be in there. A small one often is not, or only vaguely.
What it looks up live. In many cases, these assistants can also search the web while answering, read the pages they find, and base the answer on them. When they do, they usually show the sources as links. ChatGPT has a search feature that does this, and Gemini can ground its answers in Google Search. Whether a search happens depends on the product, the settings and the question. Questions about current or local information are the ones most likely to trigger one.
For a small business, the live search side is where you have real influence. If the assistant searches, it can only find and quote pages that exist, that it is allowed to read, and that say clearly what you do.
Get your basic business details consistent everywhere
When an assistant tries to answer “who does X near Y”, it is assembling facts from several places: your website, your Google Business Profile, directories, review sites, maps and mentions on other people’s websites. If those places disagree, the answer can come out wrong or leave you out.
Start with the basics and make them identical everywhere:
- Business name, written the same way each time.
- Address, or service area if you visit customers.
- Phone number and main email.
- Opening hours, including how you handle holidays.
- A one-line description of what you do, in plain words.
Then check where these details appear. Your Google Business Profile matters a great deal for local searches. If you have not set one up properly, our guide to setting up a Google Business Profile walks through it. After that, look at the directories that matter in your field and country, the trade bodies you belong to, and any old listings with a previous address or phone number. Correct or remove the stale ones.
Your own website should be the reference point that all of these agree with. A contact page with the full details as plain text, rather than inside an image, makes that easy.
Write service pages an assistant can understand
A surprising number of business websites never say clearly what the business does. The homepage has a slogan, a slider and a “contact us” button, and the services are listed as one-word labels. A person can usually work it out. A system reading the page for a specific fact often cannot.
Give each main service its own page, and make sure each page answers the obvious questions directly:
- What the service is, in one or two plain sentences.
- Who it is for, and who it is not for.
- Where you provide it, naming the actual towns, districts or regions.
- How it works, step by step.
- What the customer needs to know before booking, such as preparation, timing and how pricing is worked out.
Use the words your customers use. If people ask for a “deep clean” and your page only says “intensive sanitisation service”, you have made yourself harder to match to the question. The same thinking applies to Google’s AI Overviews, which we cover in how Google’s AI Overviews choose which websites to show.
Make sure the tools are allowed to read your site
This is a technical check, and it is easy to get wrong without noticing. AI companies use their own crawlers to fetch pages, and they generally say they respect robots.txt. OpenAI, for example, publishes the names of its crawlers and what each is used for. Some security plugins, firewalls and hosting setups block unfamiliar crawlers by default.
That can be a reasonable choice. Some businesses do not want their content used to train AI models, and that is their call. But if you want to be found by these assistants when they search, look at your robots.txt and firewall settings and make sure you are not blocking the crawlers used for search by accident. Being properly indexed by the main search engines is a sensible base too, because many AI tools rely on search results to decide which pages to read.
Be mentioned by others, for real reasons
An assistant is more likely to name a business that other sources also talk about. That is not different from how reputation worked before: people trust a business more when they hear about it from more than one place.
Real ways to earn mentions include:
- Being listed by trade associations, chambers of commerce or professional bodies you actually belong to.
- Reviews on the platforms your customers already use. Ask for them honestly, and never buy or script them.
- Local news, community sites or suppliers’ websites that have a genuine reason to mention you.
- Useful articles on your own site that other people want to link to because they answer a question well.
None of this is quick, and none of it can be fully controlled. It is also exactly what holds up over time.
Gimmicks to avoid
As with every new channel, people are selling shortcuts. Be careful with:
- Anyone who guarantees a mention. Nobody outside these companies controls their answers, and the answers vary from one conversation to the next.
- Mass-produced pages that repeat the same text for dozens of towns or keywords with the names swapped. They help no reader and can count against you in normal search.
- Fake reviews, fake directories and paid link schemes. They break platform rules and can do lasting damage to your listings.
- Hidden text or instructions aimed at AI. Writing content meant only for machines, not people, is the kind of trick search engines have long treated as spam.
How to check where you stand
Ask the assistants the questions your customers would ask, in the way they would ask them, including your town or area. Note which businesses are named and which sources are linked. Try a few different phrasings, and repeat it occasionally rather than daily, since answers change.
If an assistant gets a fact about you wrong, look for the source it seems to rely on. Often it is an old directory listing or an outdated page, and fixing that source is the real fix. Most of these products also let you report an incorrect answer directly.
This post is part of our series on what a business website needs now.
If you would like help getting your business details, service pages and crawler settings in order, tell us what you need. We will look at your site and say honestly what is worth doing and what is not.
Next in this series: Structured Data for AI Search: What a Business Site Needs
