Your Customers Are Asking ChatGPT for Recommendations. Are You Showing Up?

Something shifted in how people find local businesses, and most business owners haven't noticed yet.

A year ago, if someone needed a dentist, they'd type "dentist near me" into Google, look at the top 3 results in the map pack, check some reviews, and call. That still happens. But increasingly, people are doing something else first: they're asking an AI.

"ChatGPT, who's the best dentist in Scottsdale for dental implants?" "Perplexity, find me a reliable HVAC company in Austin." "Hey Google" — and getting an AI Overview instead of the traditional 10 blue links.

We've been auditing AI visibility as part of our 21-phase local SEO audit for the past year. Here's what we've learned.

The five platforms that matter

When we check a business's AI visibility, we test across five platforms. Each one works differently, pulls from different sources, and favors different types of content.

What we found auditing hundreds of businesses

The short version: most local businesses are invisible to AI search. Not partially visible. Completely absent.

When we test a query like "best [service] in [city]" across all five platforms, the typical local business appears on zero of them. The businesses that do show up tend to share a few characteristics:

• They already rank well on traditional search. AI Overviews pull from top-10 organic results. You can't skip the fundamentals.
• Their content is structured for extraction. Clear headings, direct answers in the first sentence of each section, specific numbers and data. AI platforms need to be able to pull a clean answer from your page.
• They have brand mentions beyond their own website. Reddit discussions, YouTube videos, local news mentions, industry directories. Ahrefs found that brand mentions correlate 3x more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks do.
• Their Google Business Profile is complete. Not "we filled in the basics." Every attribute, regular posts, photos, Q&A answers, and a review response strategy.
• AI crawlers can access their site. A surprising number of businesses have inadvertently blocked GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot in their robots.txt — usually through an overly aggressive block on all bots.

What you can do about it today

You don't need to overhaul your entire web presence. A few high-impact changes go a long way:

1. Check your robots.txt

Make sure you're not blocking the five key AI crawlers: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot. This is the single fastest fix. If these crawlers can't access your site, no amount of content optimization matters.

2. Add an llms.txt file

This is a plain text file at your domain root that tells AI platforms what your business does, what services you offer, and how to contact you. Think of it like a robots.txt but for AI understanding rather than crawling. It's a small effort for a clear signal.

3. Structure content for AI extraction

AI platforms cite passages that are 130-170 words long, self-contained, and answer a specific question directly. Look at your service pages. If someone asks "how much does AC repair cost in Phoenix," can an AI pull a clean, useful answer from your page? If the answer is buried in the fourth paragraph after three sentences of filler, it won't get cited.

4. Build your brand presence outside your website

Get mentioned on Reddit. Create YouTube content — even short videos about your services. Claim and optimize your Bing Places listing. Make sure your information is consistent across Google, Yelp, and industry-specific directories. These off-site signals are what AI platforms use to verify you're a real, trustworthy business.

5. Complete your Google Business Profile. Really complete it.

Not just name, address, phone. Every applicable attribute. Regular posts (weekly at minimum). Fresh photos. Answers to Q&A. A strategy for generating reviews consistently — not in bursts, but steadily over time. Gemini and Google's AI Overviews both pull heavily from GBP data.

The window is now

Here's the thing about AI visibility: right now, almost nobody in local SEO is optimizing for it. Only about 23% of marketers are even thinking about it. That means the businesses that start now will have a massive head start when AI search becomes the primary way people find local services — which, based on adoption trends, isn't that far away.

You don't need to be perfect. You just need to be ahead of your local competitors, most of whom haven't started thinking about this at all.