How to get your business recommended by AI assistants

Most advice on this is correct and useless in the same breath. Build a strong online presence. Be consistent. Get reviews. All true, none of it tells you what to do first.

What follows is ordered by what actually moves, with the cheapest work first.

How a business gets into an answer

An assistant answering “who should I hire for X in Y” is not consulting a ranking. It is assembling a response from what it can find and verify about the candidates. Three things decide whether you are one of them.

• Can it read your site? If your pages have no structure a machine can parse, there is nothing to lift.
• Does anything about you exist elsewhere? Directories, reviews, local press, trade bodies, other people’s articles. This is where most citations come from.
• Do the details agree? Name, services, address, phone. Conflicting information is a reason to leave you out rather than risk being wrong.

Start with the part almost nobody has done

In September 2026 we ran 52 US small service businesses through our readability checker and 44 responded. The results are worth knowing before you spend money on anything else.

Our own study. Nine categories, nine US metros, directories and national chains excluded, aggregate only. Method and full data in the maintenance cost breakdown.

Nine sites in ten had not a single heading phrased as a question a customer would ask. That is the cheapest thing on this list and the one most directly tied to being quoted, because an answer engine lifting a passage is looking for a question and an answer sitting next to each other.

The order to do this in

1. Write the ten questions, then answer them

List the ten things customers ask you before they buy. Not what you wish they asked. What they actually say on the phone. Then publish a page or a section answering each one, with the question as the heading and the answer in the first two sentences underneath it.

This is the single highest return action for most small businesses and it costs an afternoon.

2. Make the page machine readable

• Structured data. A LocalBusiness or Organization block stating what you are, where you operate and how to reach you. A third of the sites we checked had none at all.
• Real headings. An H1 and several H2s that describe sections honestly.
• Alt text on images. Six in ten sites fail this and it takes minutes.
• Do not block the crawlers. Check robots.txt for GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and OAI-SearchBot. Only one site in our sample was blocking, but that one site cannot be named no matter what else it does.

3. Fix the details that disagree

Your business name, address and phone as they appear on your site, your Google Business Profile, and every directory you are listed in. Old addresses and dead phone numbers are extremely common and they are a direct reason to be left out.

4. Get onto the sources that already get cited

This is the slow part and the part that actually decides it. Run the measurement protocol for a month and note which domains the answers keep citing in your category. That list, usually a handful of directories, a local publication or two, and a trade body, is your target list.

Faz says

The uncomfortable part of this is that roughly nine in ten citations point at somebody else’s website rather than the brand’s own. Which means most of the work that gets you named does not happen on your site at all.

People find that hard to accept because the site is the thing they paid for and the thing they can control. But you cannot fix a category answer by rewriting your homepage again. You fix it by existing, credibly, in the places the answer is already reading.

The ten questions, by trade

“List the questions customers ask” is easy to say and oddly hard to do, because the obvious ones feel too basic to publish. They are exactly the ones worth publishing. Here is the shape of it across four trades.

Notice how many begin with “how much”. Price questions are the ones businesses most want to dodge and the ones assistants most want to answer. A page that gives a real range, even a wide one with conditions, will be quoted over a page that says “contact us for a quote” every single time.

The structured data to add

A third of the sites we checked had none at all. This is the minimum for a local service business, dropped into the page head. Replace the values and it is done.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "Thompson Commercial Cleaning",
  "description": "Contract office cleaning for businesses in Greater Manchester.",
  "url": "https://example.com/",
  "telephone": "+44 161 000 0000",
  "email": "hello@example.com",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "12 Example Street",
    "addressLocality": "Manchester",
    "postalCode": "M1 1AA",
    "addressCountry": "GB"
  },
  "areaServed": "Greater Manchester",
  "priceRange": "$$",
  "openingHours": "Mo-Fr 08:00-18:00",
  "foundingDate": "2009"
}
</script>

Two fields there do more than people expect. areaServed answers the “near me” part of a query directly, and foundingDate is one of the few machine readable signals of how long you have existed, which matters when an assistant is deciding who to trust.

The consistency audit, in one sitting

Conflicting details are a reason to leave you out. Check these against each other, in this order, and fix anything that disagrees.

Bing Places is the one worth singling out. It is unglamorous, almost nobody claims it, and it feeds Copilot directly. For the amount of effort involved it is the best value item on this page.

Faz says

Everyone wants the interesting version of this answer. Something about prompt engineering, or a trick with schema, or a service that submits you somewhere.

The real answer is boring and it is why most businesses will not do it. Write down your prices. Claim your Bing listing. Fix the phone number that has been wrong since 2021. Get onto the three directories your category’s answers actually cite. That is the whole job, it takes a few weeks of unremarkable work, and the businesses that do it end up in the answer while everyone else is reading another article about AI.

What does not work

• Submitting your business. There is no submission form. Anyone selling you one is selling you nothing.
• Paying for placement. Not currently available in organic assistant answers at the small business level.
• Stuffing your site with AI keywords. Writing “AI” more often does not make an assistant more likely to name you.
• One heroic push. This compounds. Being cited is itself a signal, so whoever gets cited this year gets cited more easily next year.

How long it takes

The readability work shows up fast because it is mechanical. The rest is slower and depends on how contested your category is. Anyone giving you a date is guessing, and you should treat a promised timeline as a reason to be careful rather than reassured.

Common questions