More of your customers are asking an assistant instead of typing into a search box. "Who is a good electrician in Warwick?" "Where should we get brunch in Providence on Sunday?" The answer names a few businesses, and everyone else is invisible.
Here is what the assistants actually read when they decide who to name, what does not help, and where to start.
How AI assistants choose which businesses to name
An AI assistant does not have opinions about your business. It has sources. When someone asks a local question, the assistant searches the web, reads what comes back, and summarizes it. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google's own index and Business Profile data. ChatGPT runs its own web searches and reads the pages it finds.
That means an assistant can only recommend what it can find and understand. The businesses that get named tend to be described clearly, described the same way in many places, and backed up by what customers say about them.
What the assistants read
Your website
Your service pages are the main source for what you do and where you do it. An assistant needs plain sentences it can repeat: what you offer, which towns you serve, who your customers are, and what sets you apart. "Quality solutions for all your needs" gives it nothing. A page that says you repair and replace boilers and furnaces for homes in Cranston, Warwick, and Johnston gives it an answer.
Your Google Business Profile
Categories, services, description, hours, photos, and reviews. For Google's AI in particular, the profile is one of the most structured public sources about a local business, so keep it complete and correct. If your hours ever drift, here is how to fix wrong hours on your profile.
Reviews
Reviews tell an assistant what customers say you are good at, in their own words. A review that mentions the specific service and the town says far more than one that only says great service. You cannot write reviews for customers, but you can ask the right customers at the right moment, while the job is fresh.
What other sites say about you
Directory listings, local news coverage, chamber of commerce pages, sponsorships, industry associations, and articles that mention you. Every independent mention that matches your own description makes you easier to trust.
Structured data
Schema markup is code in your pages that labels the facts: business name, address, phone number, services, and the area you serve. People never see it. Machines use it to read your pages without guessing.
What does not help
- Keyword stuffing. Repeating "best plumber Rhode Island" down the page does not make you the best plumber.
- Claims with nothing behind them. Calling yourself top rated without the reviews to show it.
- Thin town pages. A page for every town where only the town name changes.
- Important text inside images. A graphic with your services listed on it is much harder to read than the same words as text.
- Meta keywords. Search engines stopped using them years ago.
The first changes to make
1. Make your name, address, and phone number identical everywhere
Use one spelling of your business name, one phone number, and one address on your website, your Google Business Profile, Facebook, Yelp, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, and every directory you appear in. To a machine, mismatched details can look like different businesses.
2. Rewrite your service pages to answer questions directly
Take the questions customers ask you on the phone and answer them on the page, in plain sentences, with the answer first. Name the services, the towns, and the kinds of customers you serve. Each sentence should still make sense if it is quoted on its own.
3. Make sure the assistants can reach your site
Check your robots.txt file. Some sites block crawlers without knowing it, sometimes because a security plugin or a hosting setting did it automatically. Google's crawler and OpenAI's search crawler both need to be able to read your pages. Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools is also worth a few minutes, since some assistants lean on Bing's search results.
4. Build a steady review habit
Ask happy customers soon after the work is done, and make leaving a review one tap. Reply to reviews, good and bad. A steady flow beats a sudden burst.
What about llms.txt?
An llms.txt file is a short plain text file at the root of your website that describes your business and lists the pages worth reading. It is a newer idea, and nobody has confirmed that every assistant uses it. It is cheap to add, and we publish one on our own site.
How to tell if it is working
Start by asking the assistants yourself. Pick the questions your customers ask, phrased the way they would ask them, and write down who gets named today. Ask the same questions every month.
Then check your analytics. In Google Analytics, visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, and copilot.microsoft.com show up as referrals, and you can group them into a channel of their own. For one of our home services clients, chatgpt.com sent 634 sessions between January 1 and August 22, 2026, up from roughly 7 in the same stretch of 2025. Those are visits, not leads, but a year earlier the channel barely existed.
Does regular SEO still matter?
Yes. Google's AI answers are built on the same index as its regular results, and ChatGPT reads pages that turn up in web search. A site that does not rank and does not answer questions gives the assistants nothing to work with. Showing up in AI answers is built on top of SEO, not instead of it. For the timeline side of that, see how long SEO takes to work.
Where to start
If you are doing this yourself, make the four changes above in order. If you would rather hand it off, our AI SEO service covers the audit, the fixes, and the monthly tracking of which businesses the assistants name. Call us at (401) 339-4155 or send us a note.
