Why AI assistants recommend some local businesses and not others
Ask ChatGPT for a good plumber in your town and it will name two or three. It will not name all of them. If you are not one of them, the assumption is that you lost a ranking contest. That is one explanation. The other is that nothing these systems were allowed to read said clearly what you do and where you do it, and that one is free to fix.
It matters because of how many people are asking. Pew Research surveyed 5,119 U.S. adults in February 2026 and found 44% now use ChatGPT, up from 34% a year earlier. In the same survey, 42% of all U.S. adults said they ever use a chatbot to search for information. Pew does not break out how many of those searches want a contractor. But ten points in a year is a real shift.
Google says there is no separate AI checklist
Google's documentation for site owners is blunt: there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." AI Overviews and AI Mode are Google's AI-written answers in Search.
It also names what you do not need. No new machine-readable file on your site. No special hidden code describing your business — Google's words are that there is "no special schema.org markup you need to add." If someone is charging you monthly to install a secret AI file, they are billing for something Google says in writing is not required.
What Google does require is ordinary. It has to already know about your page, and it has to be allowed to quote a line or two from it. That excerpt is called a snippet, and if whoever built your site told Google not to quote your pages, the same instruction keeps you out of the AI answers. It can hide in a tag on the page, in a header your server sends, or on single blocks of text. Have somebody check all three.
Some websites are politely telling these assistants to go away
Many websites have a small text file that tells automated visitors which pages they may read. It is optional, it is always named robots.txt, and it sits at the root of the site: your-domain.com/robots.txt. Type that into your browser right now. If nothing loads you do not have one, and nothing is blocked. If it loads, read it.
OpenAI sends out a reader called OAI-SearchBot to gather what ChatGPT uses when it searches. Its documentation is plain: "Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links." OpenAI recommends allowing it in that file, and says a change takes about 24 hours to register.
Google has a separate switch. Search Console, Google's free dashboard for website owners, holds a setting called the Search generative AI control. Including your site is the default. Set to exclude, Google says you "won't receive any traffic or impressions" from its AI features. Confirm nobody flipped it.
Blocking these readers is a defensible decision for a newspaper that sells subscriptions. For a roofing company we would call it an unlisted phone number.
Your Google Business Profile is doing more of the work than your website
Your Google Business Profile is the listing you manage at no charge — hours, phone, categories, photos, reviews — and it is what shows beside your name on Google Search and Maps. Google's guide for AI answers tells local businesses to use it, saying it "can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results." That is Google telling you where to type your facts.
Google also publishes how it ranks that listing: relevance, distance, and prominence. Relevance is how well your listing matches the question. Distance is how far you are from them. Prominence is how well known you are. You cannot move your shop closer, so the other two are the whole job.
Relevance is more literal than owners expect. If you replace water heaters at eleven at night and your listing says "Plumber" with no services, no hours, and no service area, you are asking a machine to guess. Fill in every field.
On reviews, Google is direct: "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." Asking happy customers for a review is not a growth hack. It is the entire strategy, and it is free.
Write down the things only you would know
Google's advice about the words on your site: bring something that is not a rewrite of what is already online, your own experience and your own point of view. For a local business that is easier than it sounds.
What a slab leak actually costs in your county. How long your township takes to issue the permit. The reason every house on that one street fails the same way. One page that answers a real question in plain words does more than five pages of "quality service you can trust."
The practical version: a real page for each service you sell, the towns you drive to named on the page, honest price ranges where you can give them, and hours that are true.
You can check all of this yourself this week
Four checks, none of which cost money. Open your-domain.com/robots.txt and look for anything blocking OAI-SearchBot or Googlebot, Google Search's own reader. Read your Google listing the way a stranger would. Ask ChatGPT and Google the exact question your customer would ask, with your town in it. And in Search Console, open Settings, then Search generative AI, and confirm the option selected begins "Include my site's links and content."
Google has started rolling out a Search Console report showing how often your pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, so far to a subset of owners. Read it honestly. It counts impressions and nothing else: the times links to your site were shown in one of those answers. The visits are countable too, since Google Analytics now files arrivals from ChatGPT and Gemini under a channel called AI Assistants. Neither number ties itself to a booked job.
Nobody can promise you the spot
Nothing above buys you a spot in the answer. Advertising is different: Google's ad help says ads can run above or below an AI Overview, and that text and shopping ads can show inside one. That space is for sale. The recommendation is not. Google says there is "no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google," and that it never gives advertisers special treatment in how its algorithms rank sites. You can buy the ad beside or inside the answer. Nobody can sell you the answer, including us.
Being readable and specific enough to be worth quoting puts you in the pool of businesses that can be recommended. Meeting every requirement, Google says, still guarantees nothing.
One more honest caveat: this ground moves. Google added both the generative AI control and the new report within the last year, and some of the menu names above will have changed by next summer. What sits underneath moves slower: let the machines read you, and give them something worth repeating.
All of that is free, and you should do it whether or not you ever hire anybody. If you would rather see what a site built this way looks like first, we will build you one for free and you can compare.