A few weeks ago a friend of mine needed a house cleaner. He didn't open Google. He opened ChatGPT and typed something like "reliable house cleaning service near Minnetonka that does move-outs." It gave him three names, a sentence about each, and he called the first one. He never saw a search results page. He never scrolled past an ad. The whole decision happened inside a chat window before he'd looked at a single website.
That's the part most business owners haven't caught up to yet. For twenty years, getting found meant ranking on Google. You worried about your website, your reviews, your Google Business Profile. That still matters. But a growing slice of your customers are now asking an AI assistant to just tell them who to call, and the AI answers in a paragraph. If your business isn't in that paragraph, you're not losing to a competitor who outranked you. You're losing to one the machine happened to know about.
How ChatGPT decides who to mention
Here's the thing that trips people up. ChatGPT isn't searching your website in the moment the way Google does. When someone asks it for a recommendation, it's pulling from a mix of what it learned during training and, increasingly, live web results it looks up on the spot. Either way, it's assembling an answer from what other sources on the internet say about you, not from clever keywords you stuffed onto your homepage.
So the question isn't "how do I optimize for the algorithm." It's simpler and older than that. What does the internet actually say about your business, and is it clear enough that a machine reading it can figure out what you do, where you do it, and who you do it for.
If the answer is "not much" or "it's scattered and vague," the AI has nothing to work with. It'll recommend the businesses it can describe confidently, and skip the ones it can't.
What actually helps
None of this requires a new tool or a subscription. It's mostly the same fundamentals that were always good practice, now with higher stakes.
Have a website that plainly states what you do and where. This sounds obvious, but a surprising number of small business sites lead with a slogan and make you dig for the basics. An AI reading your site should be able to tell in one pass that you're a house cleaner, you serve the western Twin Cities suburbs, and you handle move-outs. If a human has to hunt for that, so does the machine. This is one more reason owning your website and its content matters more than renting a template you can't fully control.
Get mentioned in places the AI already trusts. Your Google Business Profile, Yelp, industry directories, the local chamber, a writeup in a neighborhood publication. These are the sources AI assistants lean on for local recommendations, because they're structured and they're specific. The more consistent your name, location, and category are across them, the more confident the AI gets about putting you forward.
Collect reviews and let them describe the work, not just the star rating. When a customer writes "they did our move-out cleaning in Wayzata and got the deposit back," that sentence is gold. It gives the AI concrete language to match against a concrete question. Reviews that just say "great service" don't give it much to hold onto.
Keep your details identical everywhere. Same business name, same phone number, same service area, spelled the same way on every profile. Inconsistency makes an AI hedge, and a hedging AI recommends someone else.
You can check this yourself in five minutes
Open ChatGPT and ask it the way a customer would. "Who's a good [your trade] near [your town]?" See if you come up. Then ask "tell me about [your business name]" and read what it says back. Sometimes it nails it. Sometimes it invents details, mixes you up with another company, or admits it doesn't know you. That answer, whatever it is, is roughly what a potential customer is getting when they ask about your category. It's worth knowing.
This is the same logic behind a modern small business website and behind good local SEO. Be clear, be consistent, be present in the places that get cited. The medium changed from a list of blue links to a paragraph of prose, but what earns you the mention didn't change much.
I won't pretend anyone has this fully figured out yet. It's early, the AI assistants are changing how they pull sources every few months, and nobody can promise you the top spot in an answer nobody can see the ranking of. What I can tell you is that the businesses showing up are almost always the ones that were already clear, consistent, and well-reviewed online. The ones that don't show up usually have a fixable reason, and it's rarely mysterious.
If you're curious whether ChatGPT and the other assistants know your business exists, and what it would take to change that, it's the kind of thing I look at in an audit. Most owners have never checked, and the answer tends to be a useful surprise either way.
If you want to talk through what this would look like for your business, the audit is free and takes 30 minutes. Get in touch