AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity recommend businesses they can find, understand and trust. To improve your chances, make sure your site can be crawled, state your services, locations and prices plainly, keep your business details consistent everywhere, earn reviews and mentions on sites the assistants already trust, and answer real customer questions on your pages. No one can guarantee a recommendation.
How assistants find businesses
When an assistant answers a question like “who’s a good electrician near me?”, it usually draws on two things: what its model learned in training, and web search results it looks up for that question. Either way, it can only recommend businesses whose details are clear, consistent and backed up by other sources.
Be findable
First, make sure assistants can reach and read your site:
- Allow AI crawlers in your robots.txt unless you have a reason not to
- Keep important information as real text, not inside images or heavy scripts
- Be indexed by both Google and Bing, because different assistants use different search providers
Be understandable
Then make your business easy to describe accurately:
- One clear page per service, saying what it is, who it is for, where and what it costs
- Structured data describing your business, services and FAQs
- Answer-first writing: the answer in the first two sentences, detail after
Be trusted
Finally, give assistants reasons to believe you:
- Reviews on Google and industry sites, with your responses
- The same business name, phone number and service area across your site, Google Business Profile and directories
- Mentions in local news, industry associations, partner sites and genuine directories
- Named people with real experience behind your content
Check what assistants say today
Ask the assistants the questions your customers ask, for your area, and note which businesses they name and which sources they cite. Repeat every month or two. It is the simplest way to see whether your work is paying off. Our AI Visibility Audit does this across the major assistants.
What not to do
Avoid hidden text, mass-produced pages for every suburb, fake reviews and paid link schemes. They break search engine guidelines and can do lasting damage to how both search engines and AI systems see your business.