How to Get Your Business Recommended by AI Assistants

Something has quietly changed in how people find local businesses.

A customer who needs an electrician in High Wycombe used to open Google, scroll a page of results, open three tabs and compare. Increasingly they open ChatGPT or Gemini and type "who is a good electrician near High Wycombe" and get back a short list of three or four names with a sentence about each. They ring one. The other tabs never happen.

That is a much harsher funnel than search. Ranking eleventh on Google still gets you seen. Being the fifth best match for an AI assistant that names three businesses gets you nothing at all. There is no page two.

The good news is that the work to get named is largely work that helps you anyway, and very few small businesses are doing it deliberately yet.

Ranking and Getting Recommended Are Not the Same Job

It is worth being precise about the difference, because it changes what you do.

Search ranks pages. An AI assistant assembles an answer. It is pulling from what it learned in training, from live web results it fetches when asked, and from whatever structured facts it can find about you. Then it writes a summary in its own words and names a few businesses it feels confident about.

Confidence is the operative word. A model will not recommend a business it cannot describe. If everything about you exists only as text baked into a hero image, or as a phone number in a PDF, or as a Facebook page it cannot read, you are not a candidate, no matter how good you are at the actual job.

There is a related trap worth seeing clearly. Impressions are not clicks, and getting shown is not getting chosen. Looking at our own Search Console data over the last month, one of our location pages picked up several hundred impressions and precisely zero clicks, because it was sitting around position 36. It was technically visible and practically invisible. AI answers are the same problem with the volume turned up: you are either in the answer or you do not exist.

What Actually Makes You Citable

Say the facts in plain text

The single most common failure is that the important facts are not readable.

Your business name, what you do, where you do it, your phone number, your address, your opening hours, your prices. All of it should exist as actual text on the page, not inside an image, not only in a logo, not only in a video. This sounds insultingly basic and it is the most frequent reason a site cannot be summarised.

Write the sentence you want quoted back. If you want an assistant to say "Cool Safe Aircon install whole home air conditioning in Buckinghamshire from around £3,995," then that sentence, or something very close to it, needs to exist on your website in words.

Add structured data

Structured data is a small block of machine readable information in your page code that says, unambiguously, "this is a business, here is its name, here is its address, here is its phone number, these are its opening hours, this is its rating."

It removes guesswork. Instead of a model inferring your opening hours from a graphic, it reads them as data. For a local business the schema types worth having are LocalBusiness, and where relevant Service, FAQPage, and Review. We add this to every site we build as standard, and it is one of the highest value technical changes you can make to an existing site.

Answer the actual question somewhere on your site

Models like content that directly answers the thing being asked. A page that says "How much does whole home air conditioning cost in Buckinghamshire?" followed by a straight, specific answer is far more quotable than a services page listing capabilities.

This is where FAQ pages and genuinely useful blog posts earn their place. Not thin filler written to hit a keyword, but the six questions every customer asks you on the phone, answered properly in writing. You already know what they are because you answer them out loud every week.

Be consistent everywhere

Your name, address and phone number should match exactly across your website, your Google Business Profile, Companies House, your directory listings, and your social profiles. "Suite 4" on one and "Unit 4" on another creates doubt, and doubt is what stops a model committing to naming you.

Be mentioned by other people

This is the part you cannot do purely on your own site, and it is the most powerful.

Models weight what other sources say about you. Local news, trade directories, supplier and manufacturer approved installer lists, local Facebook groups, the town's business association, a chamber of commerce listing, a genuine partner writing about a project you did together. Being described by someone else, in text, on a page that can be crawled, is disproportionately valuable.

Your accreditations are the easy win here. If you are Gas Safe, NICEIC, or a manufacturer approved installer, make sure you are actually listed in their public directory with the right details. Those directories get read.

Reviews, in text, in public

Reviews do double duty. Google Business Profile reviews feed local search, and their text gets read as evidence of what you are actually good at. A review that says "turned up on time and fixed our boiler the same day in Amersham" is a sentence about your reliability and your service area at the same time.

An llms.txt File, and Why It Is Not Magic

There is a growing convention of publishing an llms.txt file: a plain text summary at the root of your site that tells AI models what your business is and what your key pages are. We add one to the sites we build.

Be realistic about it. It is cheap, it is sensible, and it is not yet universally read. Think of it as tidying your shopfront rather than as a lever that moves rankings. It costs an hour and it might help. It will not rescue a site whose facts are locked in images.

What Does Not Work

• Stuffing your pages with "AI optimised" keyword lists. Models are summarising, not keyword matching. Padding reads as low quality and gets you nothing.
• Publishing forty thin pages to cover every combination of service and town. This has been a bad idea for search for years and it is a worse idea now. One genuinely useful page about a place you actually serve beats twenty templated ones with the town name swapped.
• Assuming your social media covers it. Most of it cannot be crawled reliably. If a fact only exists on Instagram, it effectively does not exist.
• Waiting to see if this settles down. The work involved is the same work that improves your ordinary search visibility and your conversion rate. There is no version of this where clear facts, structured data and real reviews turn out to have been a waste of time.

Check Where You Stand, Today

Go and ask. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI results, and type the question your customer would type. "Best plumber in Beaconsfield." "Who builds websites for tradespeople in Buckinghamshire." Whatever fits.

Three things to note. Are you named at all? If you are, is the description accurate? If it is wrong, where did the wrong information come from, because that source is probably still live somewhere and worth fixing. If you are not named, look at who is, and go and see what their site does that yours does not. Usually it is not a better business. It is a more legible one.

How We Can Help

We build every site to be readable by both search engines and AI assistants: clean structure, structured data, real text, fast pages, and an llms.txt file as standard. If you have an existing site, an audit will usually turn up a handful of changes that make a disproportionate difference.

If ranking locally is the more immediate problem, start with how local service businesses actually rank in their area, and the technical side is covered in how we build websites AI can actually find.

Have a look at our SEO packages, or get in touch and we will tell you what an assistant currently says about your business.