When Google's AI recommends a business, is it yours?

• A 5-minute test: what AI says about you today
• What to fix on your website so the AI quotes it
• The technical settings
• Your Google profile, reviews and mentions
• Fewer clicks, and where to see your own numbers
• Where to start
• How we get clients found

1. Open ChatGPT, Gemini (Google’s AI assistant) and the AI Mode tab on Google.
2. Ask what a customer would ask, with your trade and your town: "best hairdresser in Rotterdam" or "who repairs bikes in Leeds".
3. Then ask about you by name: "What do you know about [your business]?"
4. Write down whether you’re named, whether your opening hours, prices and address are right, and which competitors are named, with the reason the AI gives.

If the AI says a competitor "has many good reviews" or "offers a free first consultation", it found that somewhere. Put the same kind of facts about you where it can find them. Answers change from day to day, so ask a few times, in more than one tool.

Google’s AI picks pages with the same ranking systems as normal search, so what helps you on Google helps here too. Nothing is guaranteed.

• Write what only you can write. Google asks for content based on your own experience. A page about bathroom renovation in Manchester with real projects, prices and travel times gives the AI something to quote.
• Put the facts in plain text: what you do, for whom, where, your opening hours, how to book, and a starting price or typical range. Keep them out of images and PDFs, as Google asks.
• Answer the questions people ask by phone and email, in two or three sentences each. People who tried AI Mode asked much longer questions than in normal search, Google says.
• Make one good page per service. Google’s spam rules forbid pages made mainly to catch every way people might search. A list of 30 town names helps nobody.

Sources: Google: optimizing for generative AI features (15 May 2026, updated 10 July 2026), Google Search Central: AI features and your website.

Google and ChatGPT read websites with programs called crawlers, and ChatGPT leaves out sites that block its crawler, OpenAI says.

• In robots.txt, allow Googlebot and OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search). You can still block GPTBot, which OpenAI uses to collect training data.
• Your pages must be indexed and allowed to show a snippet.
• Google’s AI features need no special file, no "chunked" text and no special schema markup.

Sources: OpenAI: crawlers, Google: optimizing for generative AI features.

When someone asks for a business nearby, Google uses its Business Profile, the box with opening hours, photos, map pin and reviews. It ranks local results by relevance, distance and how well known you are, and that last one counts your reviews and the websites that link to you.

• Fill in everything: category, services, opening hours (holidays too), photos and a booking link.
• Send happy customers a direct link to leave a review, and answer every review, good or bad, as Google recommends.
• Get mentioned where your customers look: the local newspaper, your trade association and review sites such as Tripadvisor.

If the links in your test keep pointing to one website for your trade and town, work on getting onto it.

Sources: Google Business Profile Help: local ranking, Google: optimizing for generative AI features.

When an AI Overview appears, 58% fewer people click the top result on average, Ahrefs found in desktop data for 300,000 search terms. Brands named in the overview got 35% more clicks than brands left out, according to Seer Interactive, which says it can’t prove the mention is the cause.

For a local business, being named can be enough: someone who reads your name can call, book or walk in without opening your site. To see your own numbers, open the generative AI report in Search Console. It counts how often your pages were shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode, not the clicks.

Sources: Ahrefs, 4 February 2026, Seer Interactive, 4 November 2025, Google Search Central blog, 3 June 2026, Search Console Help: Search generative AI control.

1. Do the 5-minute test in ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Mode, and write down who is named and why.
2. Open Search Console. Under Settings, check that your site is included in AI answers (it’s on by default), then open the AI report. No Search Console yet? It’s free, and whoever runs your site can set it up.
3. Fix your Google profile: opening hours, holiday hours, services and booking link, with the same details as on your site.
4. Answer three questions people asked you this month, on your site.
5. Ask three happy customers for a review, with a direct link.
6. Run the test again in a month and compare.

It’s the everyday work of our digital marketing team: fixing what keeps a site from being found, writing the pages people search for, and looking after the Google profile and its reviews, with a short monthly report in plain words. Once people find you, an AI receptionist or chatbot can answer their calls and chats, day and night.