A growing share of “who should I hire?” questions are now asked to AI assistants instead of typed into Google — and the assistant answers with two or three business names, not ten blue links. Industry surveys through 2026 show consumer use of AI for local recommendations rising steeply year over year. This guide is what a local business can actually do about it, minus the panic and the snake oil.
Where assistants get their information
AI systems don’t have a secret opinion of your business — they synthesize from what’s already public: your website’s actual text, your Google Business Profile, your reviews (count, rating, and what reviewers SAY), and established directories. Google’s own surfaces now work the same way — the retired public Q&A was replaced by AI answers (“Ask Maps”) that compose from your profile, reviews, and site. Every lever below follows from this: you can’t persuade the machine, you can only improve its sources.
The levers, in order of return
- Reviews carry the recommendation. Assistants lean heavily on rating and review text when picking who to name — reviewers describing specific services (“replaced our panel same-day”) teach the machine what you’re good at. The review system is now an AI-visibility system too.
- Say what you do in plain text. Assistants quote sentences, not vibes: a real page per service that states what you do, where, for whom, at roughly what cost, beats a beautiful homepage that says “excellence since 1998.” If your prices, service area, and specialties live only in your head, no AI can repeat them.
- Consistency across sources. Machines cross-check — mismatched names, phones, and hours across your site, profile, and directories read as uncertainty, and uncertain businesses don’t get recommended. The citation cleanup just gained a second payoff.
- Schema markup. LocalBusiness and FAQ structured data hand machines clean facts instead of making them parse prose. Cheap, invisible to visitors, increasingly how you’re legible.
- Answer real questions on your site. Assistants assemble answers from pages that already answer — the questions customers actually ask, addressed directly in text (the same shape that wins featured snippets).
What NOT to buy
The gold-rush vendors arrived on schedule: “AI SEO” retainers, guaranteed ChatGPT placement, proprietary “LLM optimization” scores. Nobody controls or reliably predicts what an assistant says, and every legitimate lever above is ordinary, verifiable work — reviews, content, consistency, markup. Anyone guaranteeing AI recommendations is selling the same thing as guaranteed rankings, which is to say: nothing.
How to check where you stand
The audit is free and takes ten minutes: ask a few assistants what a customer would ask (“best [your trade] near [your town]”, “who should I call for [specific job]”) in fresh sessions, and read what they say — about the category and about you. Wrong facts trace back to a source you can fix (usually the profile or a stale directory). Absence usually traces to thin reviews or a site that never says plainly what you do. Re-check quarterly; the answers move as your sources do.