For years, being found online meant showing up in Google’s list of links. Now many questions get a written answer instead: a few suggestions, with hours and directions, put together by an AI from what it can read about the businesses nearby.
Where the answers come from
The assistants don’t know your business. They read about it: your website, your Google listing and other listings, review sites, and articles or posts that mention you. If those disagree, or say very little, the answer may be wrong or may leave you out.
What you can control
- Your facts, the same everywhere. Hours, address, phone number and what you offer. Your hours are wrong somewhere
- A website that says it plainly. What you do, who it’s for, your hours and how to book, written as text. A menu that only exists as a photo is hard for software to read.
- Answers to the questions people ask. Whether you take groups, have parking for a bus or allow dogs, written on your site where anyone can find them.
- Reviews. Ask happy customers to leave one, and reply to the ones you get.
What nobody controls
Nobody can make an assistant recommend you, and anyone who promises it is guessing. The assistants change how they work often and don’t publish the rules. What you can do is make sure the information they find is complete, consistent and correct.
Before you pay for “AI visibility”
You may get offers to put your business “into ChatGPT.” Ask what they will actually change. If the answer is your listings, your website and your reviews, that’s useful, ordinary work. If it’s a secret method or a guaranteed spot, be careful.
What we’d do
Look at what the major assistants say about you today, fix the facts where they come from, and make your website easy for people and software to read.