TL;DR: A growing share of your customers no longer scroll Google. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI for a recommendation and act on the first answer they’re given. If those tools don’t know your business exists, you’re invisible at the exact moment someone is ready to buy. The good news: AI engines pull from sources you already control: your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and clear question-led pages on your website. Get those three right and you can be recommended within weeks. Want to know what AI says about you right now? Book a free marketing review.
The way people find a local business has quietly changed
Picture a parent at 9pm whose child has tweaked a knee at football. A year ago they’d type “physio near me” into Google and scroll. Today, a growing number of them open ChatGPT and type, “Can you recommend a good physio near Hertford that takes evening appointments?”
The AI gives them one short list. Three names, maybe four. Then they pick one and book.
If your clinic isn’t on that list, you didn’t lose to a competitor on price or reviews. You simply weren’t in the room. And here’s the uncomfortable part: most local business owners have no idea whether they’re in that room or not.
This isn’t a far-off trend. More than a third of consumers say they’ve already used an AI tool to find a local business or service, and in the UK around 30% have used an AI chatbot to research something before buying, up from roughly 12% a year earlier. Google’s own AI Overviews now appear on a large share of searches, and most people who get an answer never click through to the old blue links at all.
Why being “good at Google” no longer guarantees you show up
The instinctive response is, “We rank well on Google, so we’ll be fine.” Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.
AI search and traditional search overlap, but they’re not the same list. Research into how AI engines pick local businesses suggests there’s only a partial overlap between who ranks in the classic Google map pack and who gets named by AI, meaning a business that’s everywhere on Google can still be absent from ChatGPT, and vice versa. The engines are answering a question, not ranking a page, and they assemble that answer from whatever they can read and trust about you across the whole web.
That creates a gap, and it’s enormous. By most estimates, the overwhelming majority of local businesses (think 9 in 10) have no deliberate plan to appear in AI search at all. That’s the opportunity. While your competitors wait to “see how this AI thing plays out,” the field is wide open for the businesses that move first.
Where AI actually gets its answers
Here’s the reassuring bit. AI engines aren’t pulling recommendations out of thin air, and they’re not (yet) auctioning off the answer to whoever pays most. They’re reading sources you already own or influence:
Your Google Business Profile. When ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI need to recommend a local service, your Business Profile is the spine of the answer: your categories, services, opening hours, service area and description. A profile that’s incomplete or hasn’t been touched in a month is a profile the AI quietly skips.
Your reviews. AI summarises what people say about you. Recent, specific, plentiful reviews tell the machine you’re real, active and trusted. A handful of reviews from two years ago does the opposite.
Your website content. AI favours pages that clearly answer real questions, the kind a customer would actually ask. Vague, design-led pages with three lines of text give it nothing to quote. Clear, question-led pages give it everything.
Consistency everywhere else. Your name, address and phone number need to match exactly across Google, your site, Facebook, directories and listings. When the details conflict, the AI gets nervous and recommends someone whose story is straight.
Notice that none of this is exotic. It’s the same foundation that makes you easy to find on Google, done deliberately so machines, not just people, can read it. That’s why the smartest move isn’t to abandon SEO and chase AI; it’s to build one presence that wins in both.
The five things that get a local business recommended by AI
If you do nothing else this quarter, do these.
- Complete and refresh your Google Business Profile. Fill in every field. Add each service with its own description. Then keep it alive with posts and updates. Freshness matters, and recently updated content gets cited by AI far more often than stale pages.
- Build a steady drip of recent reviews. Not a one-off push, but a system that asks every happy customer, every week. (Our guide to 5-star reviews and local SEO walks through how to make this automatic.)
- Add question-led content to your website. Create pages and FAQs that answer the exact questions customers ask, like “how much does X cost”, “do you offer evening appointments”, “which treatment is right for Y”. Write the way people speak.
- Make your site machine-readable. Clean structured data (LocalBusiness, Service and FAQ schema) tells AI exactly who you are and what you do. It’s invisible to visitors but decisive for machines, and it measurably increases how often smaller brands get mentioned.
- Keep your details identical everywhere. One name, one address, one phone number, formatted the same way across every platform. Boring, but it’s the trust signal that stops AI substituting you for a competitor.
How to check if AI already recommends you (in 5 minutes)
You don’t need a tool to start. Open ChatGPT and Google’s AI, put yourself in your customer’s shoes, and ask the question they’d ask: “What’s a good [your service] in [your town]?” See whether you appear, how you’re described, and who shows up instead. Do it for three or four of your money-making services.
It’s a five-minute test that tends to produce one of two reactions: quiet relief, or a small jolt of “why is my competitor there and not me?” Either way, you’ll know where you stand, which is more than most of your market can say.
We’ve turned that exact process into a free, step-by-step checklist: The 5-Minute AI Visibility Test. It walks you through the prompts to run, what each result means, and the six fixes that get you cited. Grab it here.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, arguably more so. Local and specialist queries face less competition in AI answers than big national terms, so a single clinic, salon or practice can realistically become the recommended option in its area. And because so few local businesses have a plan for this yet, early movers gain an outsized advantage.
No. AI recommendations are earned, not bought. They’re built from your Google Business Profile, your reviews and your website, the assets you already own. The work is in optimising them, not paying for placement.
If your foundations are already strong, changes can show within a few weeks, because tools like Google’s AI and Perplexity pull live data. If your profile, reviews and site need work first, expect a couple of months to build the trust signals AI looks for.
The opposite. Almost everything that improves AI visibility, like a complete Business Profile, fresh reviews, clear content and clean structured data, also strengthens traditional local SEO. You’re building one presence that serves both.
Don’t guess whether AI recommends you. Find out
The businesses that win the next few years won’t necessarily be the biggest or the cheapest. They’ll be the ones AI can read, trust and confidently recommend when a customer asks.
You can run the five-minute test yourself today. Or we can do it with you and show you exactly where you stand: what AI currently says about your business, where your competitors are beating you, and the highest-impact fixes for your situation.
That’s exactly what a Free Marketing Review with Chris covers. No pressure, no jargon, just a clear picture of where you are and the fastest route to being the business AI recommends.
Book your Free Marketing Review →
Broxbourne Marketing grows leads and sales for local service businesses through websites, SEO, GEO/AI optimisation, Google Ads and social media. See how we help →
