More of your customers are typing questions like "who is a good roofer in Mar Vista?" into ChatGPT, or seeing Google's AI answer at the top of the search page. If your business is not in that answer, you are not on the shortlist. The good news: what gets you named is mostly work you should be doing anyway.
What the AI actually reads
BrightLocal studied more than 200,000 local searches across ChatGPT and Google's AI features in 2026. The sources they cited most were:
- Your Google Business Profile. The single most cited source overall, and the main one for Google's own AI.
- Yelp. ChatGPT's number one source for local businesses.
- Your own website. Business websites made up the large majority of the different sites cited.
Facebook, Tripadvisor and OpenTable show up too, depending on the industry.
What does not matter (yet)
You may get pitched "AI optimization" packages with special files or markup. Google's own guidance, updated in July 2026, says plainly that optimizing for its AI features "is still SEO": no special AI text files, no special markup, no rewriting your site for robots. Be wary of anyone who guarantees a ChatGPT ranking. The same study found AI answers change from one try to the next, and most businesses appear in only some of the attempts.
The fixes that move the needle
- Make your Google profile complete. Category, services, hours, photos, description. Our Google Business Profile checklist walks through it.
- Claim your Yelp page and fill it in. Hours, photos, services, website. One caution: Yelp does not allow you to ask customers for reviews, so claim it, complete it, and leave it at that.
- Give every main service its own page on your website. Yext found that when someone asks about a specific service, AI tools usually cite a page about that service, not a general homepage. "Water heater repair" deserves its own page; so does "drain cleaning".
- Answer real questions in plain words. Prices or price ranges if you can share them, your service area, your license number, how long you have been in business. Specific, first-hand facts are what Google says it wants.
- Keep reviews coming. In Yext's study, businesses that every AI agreed on had far more reviews than typical ones. See our guide to Google reviews.
- Do not block the search bots. Your site should let Google, Bing and the AI search crawlers (like OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot) read your public pages.
How to check where you stand
Pick three questions a customer would ask, like "best [your service] in [your neighborhood]". Ask ChatGPT and Google each one three times. Write down how often you are named. Do it again next month. A rate, like "named 2 out of 3 times", tells you far more than a single screenshot.