Why AI Assistants Recommend Some Local Businesses and Ignore Others
What ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews actually look at before naming a plumber, a lawyer or a restaurant — and the five things that decide whether it's you.
Ask an AI assistant for “a good HVAC company near Glens Falls” and it will name two or three businesses. It won't show ten blue links. If you're not one of the names, you don't exist for that customer.
After a year of watching which of our clients get named and which don't, the pattern is consistent. AI assistants are cautious. They recommend businesses they can verify from several sources that agree with each other.
1. Your basic facts must match everywhere
Name, address, phone, hours and service list should be identical on your website, your Google Business Profile, and the handful of directories that matter. An assistant that finds two phone numbers or three spellings of your name moves on to a competitor whose facts line up.
2. One page per service, written to answer the question
Assistants pull short, direct definitions. A page that opens with “A heat pump installation typically includes…” gets quoted. A page that opens with “Welcome to our website” does not. Every service you offer needs its own page with a plain answer near the top and a FAQ near the bottom.
3. Structured data
Schema markup is the machine-readable version of your page. It tells crawlers “this is a business, here is its area, here are its services, here are its reviews.” It is invisible to visitors and enormously useful to assistants deciding whether to cite you.
4. Recent reviews, not just many reviews
A business with 120 reviews and none in eight months looks closed. One with 40 reviews and three from this month looks alive. Review velocity — steady new reviews — matters more than the total.
5. An llms.txt file and a crawlable site
Newer AI crawlers look for a plain-text summary of your site at /llms.txt. It's a small file, easy to publish, and it removes guesswork. Beyond that: no login walls, no content hidden behind scripts, no robots rules blocking the crawlers that matter.
None of this is exotic. It's the same discipline that good local SEO has always required, applied with more precision. If you want to know how your business looks to an assistant today, ask one — then ask us how to change the answer.
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