Start by asking like a customer
Open ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode and Perplexity, and type what a stranger in your town would. Use plain wording, name the town and leave out your own business name for now. You are not checking whether the tool knows you. You are checking whether it names you when someone has a need, which is how most new customers will meet it.
Run each question two or three times, because the wording and the businesses named can change from one run to the next. Write down who is mentioned, what is said about them and whether anything about you is wrong. That sheet is your baseline, and it is more useful than any score a tool could invent.
- Who can fix a cracked windshield in Abbotsford this week?
- Recommend a family dentist in Chilliwack taking new patients
- What does a kitchen renovation usually cost around Mission?
- What should I ask before hiring a landscaper in the Fraser Valley?
- Is [your business name] reliable?
Follow the sources, because they are your to-do list
When an assistant searches the web, it usually shows the pages it used. Open every one. You will often find a directory listing, a review site, a local news piece or a rival’s service page. Each source is a place where you either appear accurately, appear wrongly or do not appear at all.
No tool publishes a full recipe for how it picks, and some answers cite nothing, so treat this as detective work rather than science. The pattern is still useful. If the same three sites keep turning up for your trade, a correct, complete listing on them is a better use of an afternoon than rewriting your homepage a fifth time.
Write the page an assistant could quote
Assistants lift short, clear statements. A service page that opens with who you help, what you do and where you work gives software something accurate to repeat. Put the answer first and the history later. Use headings that sound like customer questions, and give a sentence or two of answer under each before adding detail.
Make sure the page can be read at all. Text locked inside images, PDFs or scripts is easy to miss, and a robots file that blocks crawlers can keep you out entirely. Check both, then update the page whenever your prices, hours or services change so the tool is not quoting old facts.
- Your service and the towns you cover, in one plain sentence near the top
- How you price a job, in words, even if you cannot publish a fixed number
- How long the work takes and what you need from the customer first
- Licences, insurance and who does the work, with the year you started
- Phone number, address and hours as text, not inside an image
Be mentioned where the assistant already looks
AI tools learn about a business from the whole web, not only its site. Reviews that describe the work, a chamber of commerce profile, trade association membership, local news and community forums all shape the picture. A business mentioned warmly in several independent places is easier for a tool to recommend with confidence.
Earn these honestly. Ask customers to describe the job in their own words, offer a story to the local paper when something is genuinely new, and join community groups as yourself. Fake accounts and planted praise get noticed by people first and software soon after, and they put your name at risk.
Skip the tricks and keep score
Be wary of anyone who sells a fixed spot in AI answers. Hidden text written for bots, mass-produced articles and miracle files do more harm than good. An llms.txt file is an open proposal that costs little to add, but nobody has shown the big tools rely on it, so do not expect it to change much by itself.
To keep score, rerun your question list once a month. In your analytics, look for visits from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai, and add one line to your enquiry form asking how people found you. Many answers send no click at all, and a customer who says an assistant mentioned you is proof no report can give.
More of these questions will be spoken
Plenty of valley residents spend long stretches in the car on Highway 1, and assistants built into phones and dashboards make asking out loud easy. A spoken answer usually names one or two businesses, not ten. That raises the value of being the clear, easily described choice for one specific job in one specific town.
- 01Say what you do and where, in one plain sentence on your homepage
- 02Keep hours and your phone number identical on every listing
- 03Name the towns you serve in text, not only on a map
Questions & answers
Sometimes. When the tool shows its sources, you can see whether your pages are among them, and your analytics may show visits from chatgpt.com. Many mentions send no click, though, so also ask new customers how they found you. A short question on your enquiry form tells you more than a dashboard.
It can, using listings and reviews, but what it says may be thin or out of date. A plain website with your services, areas, hours and contact details gives the tool something accurate to quote, and gives customers somewhere to land after the answer sends them your way.
Where a tool browses the live web, an updated page can be picked up within weeks. Reputation takes longer, because reviews, listings and mentions build up over months. Since answers vary from run to run, judge progress over several tries across a month or two, not from a single check.
Not for the first pass. The question test, the source trace and a rewrite of your main service page are things an owner can do alone. Help makes sense when you have many locations, many services or little time. A free marketing audit is a low-pressure way to see where you stand.