First, understand where the answer comes from
AI assistants do not have a secret opinion about your business. When they recommend local places, they read the open web in real time: your Google Business Profile, your reviews, local directories, a few high-authority lists, and your own website. Then they summarize what they find.
That means two things. If those sources are wrong or thin, the AI repeats the problem with total confidence. And if a competitor has more reviews and cleaner data, the AI names them instead. You are not optimizing a black box. You are fixing the inputs the AI reads.
Fix your Google Business Profile first
For local queries, the Google Business Profile is the single most-read source. ChatGPT and Gemini lean on it heavily, and Google AI Overviews are built straight on top of it. If your profile is incomplete or out of date, every AI inherits the gap.
Claim the profile and make it complete and current. The fields that matter most for AI recommendations:
- Exact business name, address and phone, matching your website letter for letter
- The correct primary category, plus a few accurate secondary categories
- Real, current hours, including holiday hours, since 'marked as closed' kills recommendations
- A description that says what you do and who you serve, in plain language
- Recent photos, and the services or menu filled in
Reviews are the tiebreaker
Between two similar businesses, the AI almost always recommends the one with more reviews and a higher rating. Review count and recency are the clearest signal of 'this place is real and people go there'.
You cannot fake this, and you should not try. What works is a simple, steady habit: ask every happy customer for a review, make it one tap to leave one, and reply to the ones you get. Volume and freshness beat a single old burst. Thirty reviews from the last three months reads as more alive than two hundred from four years ago.
Pay attention to what reviews say, not just the star count. AI assistants read review text and pull out themes. If customers keep mentioning that you are good with kids, open late, or speak Spanish, the AI can surface you for exactly those queries.
Get named on the lists the AI trusts
When you ask ChatGPT for the best in a category, it often leans on existing 'best of' lists: local press, established directories, and niche roundups for your trade. Being mentioned in those places teaches the AI that you belong in the answer.
You do not need dozens. A few solid citations matter more than a long tail of junk directories. Make sure your business is listed accurately on the big general directories for your country, plus the two or three that are specific to your industry.
Make your own website easy to read
Your site is where the AI confirms the details. Two things help most. First, put your name, address, phone, hours and service area in plain text on the page, not buried in an image. Second, add LocalBusiness structured data, a small block of code that states those facts in a format machines read without guessing.
If your site is a single image-heavy page with the address only in the footer graphic, you are making the AI work to find basic facts, and sometimes it gets them wrong.
Be consistent everywhere
The fastest way to confuse an AI is to give it conflicting facts. One address on your site, a slightly different one on Yelp, an old phone number on a directory you forgot about. When sources disagree, the AI hedges or picks wrong.
Pick one exact version of your name, address and phone, and make every listing match it. This one habit fixes a surprising share of 'the AI got my details wrong' problems.
Then measure, do not guess
After you make changes, check whether they landed. Ask the AIs the questions a customer would, several times, and see if you start appearing. Answers vary run to run, so a single check tells you little; a mention rate across repeated runs tells you a lot.
This is the part most owners skip. They fix their profile, then never confirm whether ChatGPT actually changed its answer. Measuring closes the loop and tells you which fixes worked.