Does your business show up in AI answers?

When someone asks ChatGPT, Google's AI answers, Copilot or Perplexity for a local business, the assistant does not invent a list from nothing. It pulls from what it can find and trust: your business listings, reviews, your own website, and other sites that mention you. If those sources are thin or disagree with each other, you get left out, or worse, described wrong.

I check this for clients as part of the free checkup, and I check our own site for World Class Digital LLC the same way. Here is the practical list, in the order I would work it.

Start with a test you can do in five minutes

Open two or three assistants and ask the questions your customers would ask. Use plain language and your town: "best dog daycare in Cottonwood", "plumber in Chandler", "who builds websites for restaurants in Phoenix". Then ask directly about you: "What does [your business name] do, and where?"

Write down three things. Do you appear at all? Are your hours, services and location right? Which sources does the answer cite? That last one tells you where to put your effort.

1. Google Business Profile

For a local business this is the most important listing you have. Claim it, verify it, and fill in every field: categories, services, hours, holiday hours, service area, photos and a plain description of what you do. Answer the questions people post on it.

If you work at customers' locations or from home, you can set it up as a service-area business and hide your street address. That is the right setup for any business that serves an area without a storefront.

2. Reviews, earned honestly

Reviews are one of the clearest signals that a real business serves real customers. Ask every happy customer, make it easy with a direct link, and reply to reviews, good and bad, like a person.

Do not buy reviews, write them for yourself, or offer discounts in exchange for them. Google's policies prohibit it, and the FTC's rule against fake reviews has been in effect since October 2024. Testimonials from colleagues are not customer reviews either. Label them for what they are.

3. The same name, address and phone everywhere

Your business name, address (or service area) and phone number should match exactly across your website, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, Facebook, your industry directories and your chamber of commerce listing. "Suite 200" on one site and "#200" on another is minor. An old phone number or a previous business name is not.

4. A website that says what you do in plain words

Assistants quote pages that answer questions clearly. Each service should have its own page that says what it is, who it is for, and where you offer it. Put real answers to the questions customers ask on your site, written the way you would say them on the phone.

Behind the scenes, structured data (schema markup) labels your business name, location, services, hours and FAQs in a format machines read directly. It does not guarantee anything. It removes guesswork. When we built the EG Dynamics site, this layer was part of the build, not an add-on.

And make sure the basics are not blocking you: the site loads over a valid security certificate, it works on a phone, and your robots settings are not telling crawlers to stay away.

5. Being cited somewhere else

Assistants trust what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself. Local news, a supplier's customer page, an industry association, a podcast you were on, a nonprofit you sponsor: each independent mention that names your business and your town gives an assistant something to cite.

You cannot fake this, and you should not try. You can make it more likely by doing things worth mentioning and by asking partners to link to you when they already talk about you.

What is mostly noise: llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed file that summarizes a website for AI tools. We keep one on our own site, because it costs nothing to maintain. It is not a ranking lever. As of this writing I am not aware of any major AI search provider saying it uses llms.txt to decide which businesses to recommend. If someone is selling it to you as the way to show up in AI answers, keep your wallet closed and spend the time on the five items above.

AI answers reward the same thing customers do: a business that is easy to find, described the same way everywhere, and vouched for by real people.

Check back every few months

These tools change often, and so do the sources they lean on. Rerun your five-minute test every quarter, fix whatever is wrong or out of date, and keep asking for reviews. It is ordinary upkeep, like renewing a certificate, not a one-time project.

If your site itself is the problem, Build covers new sites and Site Recovery. If you want help planning how AI fits into the business more broadly, see AI enablement under Advisory, or read 5 practical AI use cases for small business.