Why the profile matters more than your website
For local questions, AI assistants do not start with your website. They start with structured local data, and the richest free source of that is your Google Business Profile. Google AI Overviews are built directly on top of it. ChatGPT and Gemini lean on it heavily when they answer questions about a specific place or recommend businesses in a category.
The reason is simple. A profile gives the AI clean, labeled facts: this is the category, these are the hours, this is the phone number, this is the address. Your website makes the AI hunt for the same facts in paragraphs and images, and it often gets them wrong. So before you touch anything else, get the profile complete and correct. This guide assumes you have already claimed and verified your listing inside the Google Business Profile manager.
One habit underpins everything below: every fact on this profile should match your website and your other listings exactly. When sources disagree, the AI hedges or picks a competitor it trusts more.
Categories are the biggest lever you have
Your primary category is the strongest single signal of what you are. When a customer asks for a category and an AI builds a shortlist, it starts from businesses whose primary category matches the question. Pick the most specific category that genuinely describes your main service, not a broad one. 'Mexican restaurant' beats 'Restaurant'. 'Emergency plumber' or 'Pediatric dentist' beats the generic version when it is accurate.
Then add secondary categories for the other real things you do. A med spa might be primary 'Medical spa' with secondaries for 'Skin care clinic' and 'Laser hair removal service'. Each accurate secondary category is another door an AI can walk through to reach you. Do not stuff in categories you do not actually serve, since wrong categories invite the wrong customers and can get the listing flagged.
Most owners set the primary category once at signup and never revisit it. Spend ten minutes this week. Search the category list for every term that matches what you sell, pick the most specific primary, and add the true secondaries.
- Primary category: the single most specific term for your main service
- Secondary categories: every other service you genuinely offer, no padding
- Check what categories your top competitors use, then be more specific where you can honestly be
- Revisit categories when you add a service line, since the profile will not update itself
Write the description for a person who has never heard of you
The business description is up to 750 characters of plain text, and AI assistants read it. Use it to state what you do, who you serve, and what makes you the obvious pick, in normal sentences. Skip the slogans. Write the way you would explain your business to a neighbor.
Front-load the concrete facts an AI needs to match you to a question: the service area, the specific services, who the customer is, and any real differentiator like weekend hours, Spanish-speaking staff, or same-day appointments. If a customer might ask 'is there a dentist open Saturday near me', the words 'open Saturdays' should appear here. Avoid keyword stuffing, which Google discourages and which reads as spam to both people and AI.
- Lead with what you do and the area you cover
- Name the specific services a customer would search for, in plain words
- Include real differentiators a customer asks about: hours, languages, payment, accessibility
- Keep it honest and readable, no keyword lists
Fill in services, menu and products in full
The services section (or the menu for restaurants, or products for shops) is a list the AI can read item by item. This is where you capture the specific, long-tail questions. A general contractor who lists 'bathroom remodel', 'kitchen remodel', 'deck building' and 'window replacement' as separate services can be surfaced for each of those, where a profile that just says 'general contractor' cannot.
Add a short description and a price or price range to each item where you can. Real prices help an AI answer 'how much does X cost near me', and a profile with prices often gets quoted over one without. If you do not publish fixed prices, a range or 'starting at' is still better than blank.
Be exhaustive but accurate. List every service you actually offer, and only those. This single field is often the difference between showing up for a broad category and showing up for the exact thing the customer typed.
Set hours, special hours and attributes so you are never marked closed
Hours are one of the most quoted facts and one of the most common things AI assistants get wrong. A 'permanently closed' or 'temporarily closed' flag, or an out-of-date holiday hour, can drop you out of a recommendation entirely, because no AI suggests a place it thinks is shut. Keep regular hours current, and set special hours for every holiday and one-off closure before it arrives. This is the field most worth checking the week before any major holiday.
Attributes are the structured yes/no facts: wheelchair accessible, free parking, outdoor seating, accepts credit cards, LGBTQ friendly, women-owned, free wifi, by appointment only. AI assistants use these to answer filtered questions like 'wheelchair accessible dentist near me' or 'restaurant with outdoor seating'. Turn on every attribute that is true. Each one is a question you can now be the answer to.
- Confirm regular hours match your website and your door exactly
- Add special hours for holidays and closures in advance, not after
- Remove any stale temporary-closed flag left over from past disruptions
- Set every true attribute: accessibility, parking, payment, amenities, identity tags
Photos, Q&A and posts: the fields owners forget
Photos do not get read as text, but a profile with current, real photos signals an active, legitimate business, and active businesses get recommended over dormant-looking ones. Add a clear logo, a storefront shot, and recent photos of your work, your space and your team. Stale or empty photo sections make a listing look abandoned.
The Q&A section is public, and anyone can post a question, including a question with a wrong answer. Seed it yourself: post the real questions customers ask and answer them in plain text. This is free text the AI can read, and it lets you correct misinformation before someone else fills the gap with a guess. Check it regularly so a stray wrong answer does not become the fact an AI repeats.
Posts (updates, offers, events) are short, dated entries. They tell Google and the AIs that the profile is maintained, and they are a place to surface timely facts like seasonal hours or a new service. A post every week or two is enough. The point is to look alive, not to go viral.
Reviews and your website do the rest, and they live elsewhere
Two things outside the profile fields decide a lot. The first is reviews. Between two similar profiles, the AI almost always names the one with more recent reviews and a higher rating, and it reads the review text to learn what you are good at. That is a habit, not a field, and it has its own playbook: see How to get more Google reviews.
The second is your website. The profile is where the AI gets the facts, and your site is where it confirms them. Adding LocalBusiness structured data to your site states your name, address, hours and services in a format machines read without guessing, and it should match your profile field for field. See How to add LocalBusiness structured data to your website. Together these two pieces back up everything you just fixed on the profile.
Confirm it worked by checking mention rate, not a single answer
After you finish, do not assume the AIs noticed. Ask them the questions a customer would ask, in plain language, the way a real person types: 'best Mexican restaurant in [your town]', 'emergency plumber near [your area] open now', 'pediatric dentist that takes [insurance]'. Then look at whether your name comes up.
Here is the catch most people miss. AI answers vary run to run. Ask the same question three times and you can get three slightly different shortlists. So a single check tells you almost nothing. What tells you something is the mention rate: how often you appear across several runs of the same question. If you went from named zero times out of five to three times out of five after fixing your categories and hours, that is real movement. If you are still at zero across repeated runs, you have more work to do. There is a related guide on this: How to check whether your business shows up in ChatGPT.
This is the loop most owners skip. They fix the profile, feel done, and never confirm the AI changed its answer. Checking mention rate across repeated questions is exactly the work LocalFox automates: it runs the questions a customer would ask across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews several times each, shows you how often you are named, quotes what those AIs say about you (including anything they get wrong), and explains which competitors got recommended instead. You can do all of it by hand. The tool just does the repeated runs and the tallying for you.