How to Rank in AI Search
More people now ask ChatGPT or Gemini for a local tradesperson than read a directory. Ranking in ChatGPT is not a trick: assistants summarise sources they trust, so the businesses that get recommended are the ones with a complete Google Business Profile, consistent citations, clean structured data and a steady flow of recent reviews.
How AI assistants actually source local business information
ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity do not hold a private map of your town. When someone asks for an electrician in Bristol, the assistant runs a search behind the scenes and summarises what it finds, usually from a web index plus whatever business data its provider licenses. Gemini leans on Google's own local data. ChatGPT and Perplexity lean on live web results and structured pages they can parse quickly.
That means AI search visibility is downstream of the same things that make you findable in ordinary search: a well-maintained Google Business Profile, consistent listings elsewhere, and pages that state plainly who you are, what you do and where you do it. Generative engine optimisation is not a separate discipline bolted on the side. It is the same groundwork, judged by a reader that skims faster and quotes more literally.
Why your Google Business Profile and citations still drive it
Assistants prefer facts they can corroborate. If your phone number is the same on your website, your Google Business Profile, Yell, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect and your trade body listing, the model can state it with confidence. If those sources disagree, you are far more likely to be left out of the answer entirely than to be quoted incorrectly.
Practical work: verify and complete your Business Profile, set an accurate primary category, list your real service areas, and correct your name, address and phone everywhere they appear. This is unglamorous and it is the single highest-leverage thing you can do for both Maps and AI answers.
What structured data contributes
Schema markup does not make a model like you. It makes you cheap to parse. LocalBusiness schema with your name, address, phone, opening hours, service area and sameAs links to your social profiles gives an assistant a clean, unambiguous block of facts instead of a paragraph it has to interpret.
FAQPage markup earns its place where you genuinely answer questions, because answer engines lift question-and-answer pairs directly. Service and Organization schema tie your pages together with a shared identifier so the model understands they belong to one business. This is what answer engine optimisation, or AEO, means in practice.
Why review volume and recency matter more here than in classic SEO
Ask an assistant to recommend a plumber and watch what it does. It summarises sentiment. It says things like 'well reviewed for emergency callouts' because that phrasing exists across your reviews. A business with 90 reviews mentioning boiler repairs, punctuality and fair pricing gives a model something specific to say. A business with six reviews reading 'great job' gives it nothing.
Recency matters because assistants weight fresh sources heavily when they run a live search. A steady trickle of reviews every week is worth far more than a batch collected two years ago, and the words your customers use become the words the model uses about you.
The kind of pages that get quoted
Models quote pages that answer a question directly and early. Put the answer in the first two sentences, use plain headings that match how people ask, and keep facts in short, self-contained paragraphs rather than spread across a long narrative. Tables, numbered steps and clear definitions get lifted more often than prose.
Also be specific about where you work and who you work for. 'Air conditioning installation across Bournemouth and Poole' is quotable. 'Serving the South and surrounding areas' is not.
How to check whether you currently appear
- 1Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for the best in your trade in your town, and see whether you appear at all.
- 2Ask each assistant directly about your business by name and check whether the phone number, hours and services it returns are correct.
- 3Run the same question with the search or browsing tool enabled and note which websites are cited, since those are the pages you are competing with.
- 4Check whether an AI Overview appears for your main service query in Google, and which sources it pulls from.
- 5Repeat the checks monthly. Answers change as your citations and reviews change.
If you are missing from Maps as well, start there: why your business is not showing up on Google Maps. The same profile work feeds both.
Want to know how you look to AI right now?
We will run the checks above for your business and show you what the assistants say, alongside what needs fixing in your Google Business Profile.