How to get your business recommended by AI
05 Sept 2026, 09:00 am · 4 min read
More and more, a customer's first move isn't a search engine, it's a question to an AI. "Who's the best sparky in Fremantle?" "Find me a dog-friendly café near the beach." The assistant answers with a short list of names. Being one of those names is the new shopfront window.
Search is becoming an answer, not a page of links
For twenty years, getting found meant ranking on a page of blue links. That still matters, but a growing slice of people now read a single AI answer and act on it, from ChatGPT and Gemini to the AI summary sitting on top of Google itself. The model reads the web, decides who fits, and names a few businesses. You want to be the one it's confident enough to recommend.
What makes a business easy to recommend
An AI recommends what it can understand and trust. In practice that comes down to a handful of unglamorous things.
Say it in plain words
State what you do, where you do it and who for, in real text on your own site. If it's only in a logo or a pretty banner, the model can't read it.
Be consistent everywhere
Same business name, address and phone on your site, Google, socials and directories. Contradictions make an AI hedge, or pick someone clearer.
Show real proof
Specific reviews, recent jobs, suburbs served, brands worked with. Concrete detail is what a model quotes back to a customer.
Answer the actual questions
Prices, areas, hours, 'do you do X?'. A page that answers plainly is a page an assistant can lift a confident answer from.
The old basics still do the heavy lifting
None of this replaces the fundamentals, it leans on them. An AI builds its answer from signals it trusts: a real website you own, a claimed Google Business Profile, reviews, and details that agree across the web. Get those right and you're feeding the machine the truth you want it to repeat.
- Own a real site. A social page you rent isn't enough, and it can vanish with a policy change.
- Claim your Google Business Profile. It's still one of the strongest local signals, for people and machines.
- Keep details identical everywhere. One name, one address, one number.
- Earn honest reviews. They're proof a model weighs, and customers do too.
Where it goes wrong
The businesses AI skips are usually the invisible ones: no real website, thin or contradictory information, or claims with nothing to back them. Worse, when your real details are hard to find, the model may guess, and get your hours or your services wrong. The fix isn't a trick. It's making the true version of your business the easiest one to find.
The businesses AI recommends are the ones that say plainly what they do, where, and for whom, in words a machine can read.
How we build for it
We build sites that are easy for both people and assistants to understand: clear service and area pages in real text, proof that's specific, fast and mobile-first, structured so the important facts are readable, and all on a domain you own. The same things that make a site convert also make it quotable.
You can't control exactly what an AI says. You can control whether the honest, complete version of your business is the easiest thing for it to find, and that's most of the battle.