The behaviour is now ordinary. Somebody needs a plumber, a dentist, a decent restaurant for Saturday, and instead of opening Google they open an assistant and ask, in a full sentence, as though they were asking a friend who knows the area.
And the assistant answers with a shortlist. Two or three names, with a sentence about each.
Being one of those names is worth a great deal, and the way you get there is genuinely different from the way you rank on Google. Understanding that difference is most of the work.
In short: the assistant builds its shortlist from what other sources say about you, not from what you say about yourself. Map listings, review platforms, directories, local news, forum threads. So the work is making those sources accurate and favourable, keeping your details identical everywhere, and building the kind of reviews that contain useful sentences rather than only stars.
The key difference: it does not trust you about you
On Google, your own website is a primary source. You write a page, Google reads it, and if it is good, it can rank.
An assistant giving a recommendation behaves differently, and for a sensible reason. It has been built to be helpful to the person asking, and it knows that a business describing itself as the best in town is an advertisement. So when it needs to name somebody, it leans on sources with no stake in the answer.
For a local business that usually means Google's map listings, review platforms, well established directories, local publications, and discussion threads where real people mentioned businesses by name.
Your website still matters. It confirms who you are, what you do and where, and it fills in details the other sources leave out. But it is rarely the thing that puts you on the shortlist. That is decided elsewhere, which is uncomfortable, because elsewhere is not something you control directly.
You can still influence it, though. That is what the rest of this is about.
One: make your details identical everywhere
This is unglamorous and it matters more than anything else technical.
Your business name, address, phone number, opening hours, and the services you offer should be written the same way in every place they appear. Your website, your Google profile, every directory, every professional body listing, every social account.
When these disagree, an assistant assembling an answer has to decide which version to believe, and uncertainty makes it more likely to name a business it is sure about instead. Consistency is not only about accuracy. It is about being an easy business to describe confidently.
Go and look. Most owners discover an old address, a previous phone number, or hours from three years ago sitting on a directory they had forgotten existed. The method is in the citation cleanup guide.
Two: reviews, and specifically what they say
Reviews matter here for a reason beyond the obvious. The assistant is not only counting stars. It is reading sentences, and then summarising them.
So a review that says "they came out at eleven at night when our boiler failed and did not charge a fortune" is a sentence an assistant can use in a recommendation. Fifty reviews saying "great service" give it nothing to work with.
When you ask for a review, and you should ask every satisfied customer on the day, encourage specifics. What was the problem, what did you do, what was the outcome. Not a script, just a gentle prompt: it helps others if you mention what we did for you.
Recency matters as it does everywhere. And breadth matters more than it used to, because an assistant may draw on several platforms rather than only one.
Three: be mentioned somewhere that is not yours
This is the part that separates businesses that get recommended from businesses that do not, and it is the part most owners have never attempted.
An assistant is much more comfortable naming a business that appears in independent places. Local news coverage. A trade association member listing. A supplier's list of approved installers. A community organisation you sponsor. A well moderated local directory. A genuine discussion thread where somebody recommended you.
None of this requires public relations expertise. It requires a few deliberate actions. Join the professional body and make sure your listing is complete. Ask the manufacturers you install to add you to their approved list. Tell your local paper when something genuinely newsworthy happens. Answer questions in local groups honestly, without advertising, so that when people recommend businesses your name is one that appears.
We wrote more about why this now matters in brand mentions are the new backlinks, and about the role of forum discussion in Reddit as a trust layer for small business.
Four: make your own pages easy to quote
Your website's job in this process is to be the clear, quotable record of the facts.
That means plain statements rather than marketing language. Where you work, listed as places. What you do, listed as services. Your hours, your response times, your qualifications, your prices or how prices are worked out. Answers to the questions customers actually ask, written as questions with direct answers underneath.
Short, complete sentences work better than long, atmospheric paragraphs, because a passage that answers a question in one or two sentences can be lifted and used. A page of beautiful prose about your values cannot.
And put dates on things. A page that says when it was last updated is easier to trust than a page that could be from any year.
Five: check what it currently says
You cannot improve this without looking at it, and looking takes ten minutes.
Open an assistant in a fresh conversation, not signed into anything that knows your history. Ask the way a customer would: who are the best plumbers in your town, or where should I go for a dental implant in your area. Then ask about your business by name, and ask whether it is any good.
Write down exactly what comes back. Are you named? Are the details correct? Is anything simply wrong? Who else is named, and what is said about them?
Repeat it across two or three assistants, because they use different sources and give different answers. Then repeat the whole exercise in a few months, because it changes.
If the answer contains something factually wrong about you, that usually traces back to a source with wrong information, and correcting the source is the fix.
What not to bother with
Two things, because they waste money.
Anybody guaranteeing placement in AI recommendations is selling something they cannot deliver. There is no advertising slot to buy in that answer.
And do not add a link on your own site sending visitors off to ask an assistant about you. It gives away the visitor and hands the description of your business to a system that may name a competitor in the same breath. We set out the full argument in why we do not use an "ask AI about us" link.
Where to start
Do the ten minute check first, so you know what is currently being said.
Then fix your details everywhere, because it is free and it removes uncertainty. Then start the review habit, with a gentle nudge toward specifics. Then, over the following months, get yourself into two or three independent places that would naturally list a business like yours.
To see how your business currently looks to both search engines and AI assistants, our free visibility check reports back in plain language on where you appear and what is missing.
The businesses being recommended today are rarely the ones with the cleverest marketing. They are the ones that were easy to find, consistent everywhere, well reviewed in sentences rather than stars, and mentioned by somebody other than themselves.