People Are Asking AI for Recommendations. Here's What Local Businesses Should Do Now.

More people now ask an assistant rather than scroll through results: who's a good accountant near Albany Creek, which website platform suits a small clinic, how do two suppliers compare. The answer may name businesses, pull from several sources or summarise a comparison.

You can't control what an AI writes. You can control whether the information it could use about you is accurate, easy to find and worth citing. That's the whole game, and it's less mysterious than the marketing around it suggests.

What Google actually says

Google's published guidance for its generative AI features is refreshingly plain: create unique, people-first content; make sure pages are crawlable and indexable; provide a good page experience; use structured data that matches what's on the page where it's relevant. It says structured data isn't required for these features, and that special AI formatting, content 'chunking' and llms.txt files aren't needed for Google Search.

Seven things worth doing

1. State the basics plainly. Who you are, what you do, where you work and who you serve, in sentences a person would write, on your homepage and About page.
2. Keep facts consistent. Name, service area, contact details and descriptions should match across your site, Google Business Profile, social profiles and directories.
3. Publish first-party information. How you work, what's included, how pricing works, how long things take. Information nobody else can publish is what's worth citing.
4. Answer real questions. Start from the questions in your inbox and on the phone, and write specific answers.
5. Get the technical foundations right. Fast, stable, crawlable pages, with structured data that matches visible content.
6. Earn genuine mentions. Real reviews, real local mentions and real partnerships. Manufactured mentions provide little value.
7. Check and record. Ask the assistants customers use the questions customers ask, in a fresh session, and keep the answers. Repeat monthly and treat it as a trend.

What to be sceptical of

• Guarantees of AI rankings or placement
• 'AI-optimised' pages stuffed with keywords or hidden text
• Tools claiming to show what's inside any AI system's private data
• Anyone selling this as unrelated to good SEO: it isn't

If you'd like help, AI search visibility covers how we baseline, fix and track it, alongside the broader SEO, AEO and GEO work.