Short version: the AI answers lean on the same things Google always has. Your website, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and the listings on other sites that mention you. Get those right and you give both of them something to point to.
More people now skip the list of links and just ask. “Who’s a good electrician in Nanaimo?” goes into ChatGPT, or Google answers it with an AI summary above the first result. The answer names two or three businesses, and the customer calls one of them. If you’re not named, you never hear about that customer at all.
What the answers lean on
An AI assistant doesn’t know your business. When someone asks who to call, it searches the web, reads what it finds and sums it up. So what it says about you comes from what’s already written about you:
- Your website. What you do, where you do it and how to reach you, in plain words on a page it can read.
- Your Google Business Profile. Your categories, services, hours and photos, with your website linked.
- Your reviews. How many, how recent, and what people say in them.
- Listings on other sites. Directories, review sites and local listings the AI reads when it checks who’s out there.
None of that is new. It’s the same groundwork that gets a business into Google’s map results. What’s changed is how much a gap costs you, because the AI picks a few names and leaves everyone else out.
What happened when I checked my own business
On October 8 I asked an AI assistant the same kind of question 12 times, each in a fresh conversation: who should I hire for web design in Victoria? It didn’t name OBdesign once. Useful to know, if not much fun.
The more interesting part was where the answers came from. In 10 of the 12, the AI drew on directory sites that list and rate web design companies, like GoodFirms and DesignRush. I wasn’t on either of them. My website was there and my reviews were there, but the places the AI was actually reading didn’t know I existed.
So here’s what I’m doing about it, which is the same list I’d give anyone:
- Listings on the directories those answers read. I applied to both in mid-October.
- A page on my site for each service, so a question about one thing has a page that answers it.
- More Google reviews, by asking every client when their project wraps up.
Nobody can promise that an AI will name them, and I won’t promise it to you either. What you can do is make sure everything it reads about you is there, and right.
Five things to check this month
1. Finish your Google Business Profile. Open it and fill in everything: your main category and any others that fit, every service you offer, your hours (holiday hours too), the towns you serve, and a link to your website. Add real photos of your work, your shop or your truck. A profile with blanks gives an AI less to say about you.
2. Ask every customer for a review. Not only the ones you know were happy: everyone, every time, right after the job. Copy your review link from your Business Profile and turn it into a QR code for the counter, the invoice or the back of a business card. Google’s rules say you can’t offer anything in return for a review, and you don’t need to. Most people are glad to help when it takes thirty seconds.
3. Say what you do and where, plainly, on your website. “Septic installs in the Cowichan Valley” does more than “Quality solutions since 1998”. Put your services, your towns, your phone number and your hours on the page as words, not only inside a picture. If an AI can’t read it, it can’t repeat it.
4. Make your name, address and phone number match everywhere. Your website, your Business Profile, Facebook, Yelp, Yellow Pages and any local directory should all say the same thing, spelled the same way. An old number on a listing you forgot about makes it harder for anyone, person or AI, to tell which details are right.
5. Add business markup to your website. It’s a small block of code that tells search engines and AI, in their own format, your business name, address, phone number, hours and services. It’s part of what people call SEO. Many website platforms have a setting or an add-on for it, and if yours doesn’t, whoever looks after your site can add it.
None of these take long on their own. Together they make sure that when someone asks who to call in your town, everything the answer leans on tells the same, complete story about you.
Where to start
If you’d like to know where you stand today, I’ll make you a free AI report. I ask an AI who it recommends for your trade in your town, and you get who it named, how often, and what would change it.
And if your website is the gap, I’ll build you a free preview of the top of a new homepage, sent with the price. If you don’t like the preview, you pay nothing and that’s it.
