Ask ChatGPT “who’s a good accountant for small businesses in Hackney?” and it will name a few firms. Ask Perplexity or look at Google’s AI Overviews and you will see the same pattern: a short answer, a handful of businesses, and links to the sources it used.
If your business is not in those answers, you are missing a conversation your customers are already having.
How AI assistants choose who to mention
There is no single ranking factor, and nobody outside these companies knows exactly how they work. But the pattern is consistent. AI assistants tend to mention businesses that are:
- Clearly described. The assistant can tell exactly what you do, where, and for whom.
- Consistent. The same facts about you appear across your website, your Google Business Profile and the directories and review sites it reads.
- Cited by others. You are mentioned on sources the assistant trusts: local guides, trade bodies, news sites and well-known directories.
- Quotable. Your pages contain short, direct answers to the questions people ask.
Five practical steps
1. Say what you do in one plain sentence
Put it near the top of your homepage and your main service pages: what you do, where, and for whom. “We’re an emergency plumber covering Walthamstow, Leyton and Chingford” is far easier for an AI to use than “Delivering excellence in plumbing solutions.”
2. Answer the questions customers actually ask
Write down the ten questions you hear most on the phone. Answer each one on your site in two or three sentences, then go into detail if needed. These short answers are exactly what AI assistants lift and cite.
3. Make your facts match everywhere
Check your business name, address, phone number, opening hours and services on your website, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect and the main UK directories. Small differences make you look like two different businesses.
4. Let AI crawlers read your site
Some websites block AI crawlers by accident, often through a security setting or a plugin. Check your robots.txt file. If you want to be cited, the crawlers need to be allowed in.
5. Earn mentions on trusted sites
Local news, trade associations, “best of” guides and supplier pages all count. One mention on a respected local site is worth more than dozens of low-quality directory listings.
How to check where you stand
Ask the assistants yourself. Use the questions a real customer would type, in a private browser window, and note who gets mentioned. Do it again next month.
Or let us do it properly: the AI answers check is part of every free Search MOT.