Getting found when people ask an AI instead of Google
What actually influences whether an assistant names your business, and what nobody can promise you.
A growing share of your customers are not searching. They are asking.
Instead of typing "plumber near me" and scanning ten blue links, someone asks an assistant and acts on one answer. That is a meaningfully different game: there is no page two, and being the answer is worth considerably more than being a result.
Which has produced an enormous amount of nonsense. So here is the version we can actually defend.
What nobody can promise you
- A "ranking" in ChatGPT. There is no ranking. There is no ad slot to buy. Anyone selling you a position is inventing it.
- That an assistant will name you for a given question, consistently or at all.
- Stable results. The same question asked twice can produce different answers.
- That any of this holds still. These systems change substantially every few months.
If a marketing company promises you any of the above, that is the whole review of that company.
What genuinely influences it
These systems draw on the open web, on structured data, and on sources they have reason to trust. Businesses that are easy for a machine to understand get described accurately. Businesses that are ambiguous get skipped or described wrongly.
- Consistency. Your name, address, phone and hours identical everywhere they appear. Contradictions make a business unusable to a system trying to state a fact.
- Structured data. Schema markup that says plainly what you are, where you are, what you do, and when you are open. Not implied by a layout, stated.
- Answers written on the page. Actual questions with actual answers in plain language. Text a system can lift a sentence from.
- Specificity. "Emergency plumbing in Sioux Falls, 24 hours, including weekends" is usable. "Quality solutions for all your needs" is not.
- Being cited elsewhere. Local directories, trade associations, press, review platforms. Corroboration matters.
- A crawlable site. If your content only appears after JavaScript runs, some crawlers never see it.
The unglamorous truth
This is largely the same discipline that has always made local search work, applied to a new surface. Get your facts consistent, mark them up properly, answer real questions plainly, and be fast and crawlable.
There is no trick, and the businesses treating it as a trick are going to waste money.
What we do about it
On the Visibility plan we handle the consistency work, the structured data, the Google Business Profile, and the content that answers real questions. We also check what assistants currently say about your business, which is often the most sobering part of the whole exercise.
What we will not do is send you an invoice for a ranking that does not exist.
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