People now ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Google itself for a recommendation the way they used to type a search. The assistant names three or four businesses and most people pick from those. The question every owner asks is how to be one of them, and the honest answer is that assistants name businesses they can identify confidently and quote accurately. That is work you can do.
What an assistant reads before it names you
Assistants are built on web search. Before answering, they pull pages from the normal index — your site, your Google Business Profile, directories, reviews — and look for agreement. If your name, address, services and area match everywhere, you are a clear entity and safe to recommend. If your site says one thing, your listing another and a directory a third, you are a risk and you are left out.
Step one: become a clearly defined entity
- Same business name, address and phone number on your site, Google Business Profile and the main directories.
- A plain-language description of what you do and where, on your homepage and in your profile — not a slogan.
- Structured data (schema) that states your business type, services, area served and contact details, so machines do not have to guess.
- An About page that says who runs the business and since when. Assistants weight real, named businesses over anonymous ones.
Step two: publish answers written to be quoted
Assistants lift passages that answer a question completely in two or three sentences. Look at the questions your customers ask — price, timing, area, what is included — and answer each one directly on the relevant page, in a short paragraph that would make sense on its own. FAQ sections with real answers work; marketing fluff does not, because it cannot be quoted as a fact.
Step three: give it something to point to
Reviews, case studies with numbers and clear service pages are what an assistant cites when it explains why it chose you. A page that says what you did for a customer and what changed is far more useful to it than a page of adjectives.
How to measure it
Search Console now reports impressions and clicks from AI surfaces separately, so you can see whether assistants are showing your pages. On a local trade site we worked on, those impressions went from 6,100 to 9,800 in a single month after tightening entity details and publishing direct answers — and the owner started getting jobs from people who said they had asked ChatGPT. You can also simply ask the assistants yourself, once a month, the questions your customers would ask, and note who they name.
None of this replaces ordinary SEO; it sits on top of it. A site that is slow, unclear or not indexable will not be quoted by anything. Get the foundations right, make the business unambiguous, and write the answers people are actually asking for.