How AI search tools decide which local businesses to recommend (and what you can do about it)

If your business is described well in those places, you have a real chance of being named. If the information is thin, scattered or contradictory, the tool has very little to work with, and it will reach for a competitor it understands better.

The encouraging part is that almost everything these tools read is something you can improve. This guide explains how the process works in plain English, what we found when we rebuilt a law firm’s website for AI search, and the fixes worth making first.

How an AI tool puts together a local recommendation

The details differ from product to product and change often, so treat this as the general pattern rather than a specification.

Most AI search tools work in two steps. First they search: behind the scenes they run one or more web searches, much like a person would, and gather a handful of pages that look relevant. Then they write: a language model reads those pages and composes an answer, usually with links to the sources it used.

Google says its AI features, AI Overviews and AI Mode, draw on pages that are already indexed in Google Search, and that no special optimization or extra markup is required (opens in a new tab) beyond normal search best practices. ChatGPT’s search feature and Perplexity also search the web and show the pages they cited. For local questions, business-listing and map data matter too, because that is where hours, addresses, categories and reviews live.

So the practical takeaway is simple. An AI tool can only recommend you based on what it can find and read about you. Its answer is a summary of your online footprint.

What these tools look for

Nobody outside these companies has a published scoring formula for AI recommendations. The inputs, though, are the same public sources local search has always relied on. Google’s own guidance names three factors for local results: relevance, distance and prominence (opens in a new tab). In practice, these are the signals worth your attention:

• A clear description of what you do and where. Pages that name your services and the cities you serve in plain words, near the top. A homepage headline like “quality you can trust” tells a machine nothing. “Water heater repair and replacement in Mesa and Gilbert” tells it exactly what to match.
• Consistent business details. The same name, address, phone number and hours on your website, your Google Business Profile and every directory that lists you. When those disagree, any system has a harder time being sure it has the right business.
• Reviews. Google states that more reviews and positive ratings can help a business’s local ranking. The wording of reviews also gives AI tools real phrases about what you are like to work with.
• Mentions on other sites. Local news, trade associations, chamber of commerce listings and industry directories all confirm that you are real, local and active.
• Direct answers to real questions. A page that answers “how much does drain cleaning cost in Chandler?” in its first paragraph is easy to quote. A page that makes readers scroll past three paragraphs of introduction is much harder to use.
• Structured data. Schema markup labels your business name, address, services and FAQs in a format machines read reliably. It guarantees nothing on its own, but it removes guesswork, and Google asks that it match the visible text on the page.
• A site the tools can reach. If your robots.txt file blocks crawlers, or key details only exist inside images, some tools may never see them.

What this looks like on a real website

We published a before-and-after report on our work for Lazzara Law Firm, a personal injury firm serving the Phoenix metro. The firm had real credibility and useful content. Its website simply didn’t present those strengths in a way that search engines or AI tools could reliably read and cite. Our initial audit scored it 3 out of 10 for answer-engine readiness.

Among the problems the report documents:

• Template content from a different law firm was live on the site, including on the car accident page.
• Sampled pages had little to no useful structured data.
• FAQs existed, but many answers didn’t open with a complete, direct answer.
• Key pages started like marketing brochures instead of answering the visitor’s question.
• Several Phoenix-metro cities the firm serves, including Mesa, Chandler and Gilbert, had no page of their own.

Most of the fix was unglamorous. We removed the wrong-firm content, moved a direct answer to the top of each key page, rewrote the FAQs so every answer stands on its own, and added attorney-reviewed bylines and last-updated dates. We also built six new city pages plus a Phoenix metro hub and added structured data throughout. The final check covered 35 target pages: all 35 had a direct answer near the top and an attorney byline, with zero structured-data errors.

The report is just as clear about what a website can’t fix alone. Google Business Profile updates, review generation and directory profiles all needed access from the firm’s account owners. Those off-site signals are the next lift. Keep that in mind for your own business: a good share of what AI tools read about you lives on sites you don’t own.

Where to start this month

You don’t need a rebuild to make progress. Work through these in order. The first few are quick, and the later ones compound over time.

1. 1.Search for yourself the way a customer would. Ask two or three AI tools for your service in your city. Note who gets named and which sources they cite, because those sources show you where the tool is looking.
2. 2.Tighten your Google Business Profile. Confirm your primary category, services, hours, service area and description, and add recent photos. Make sure the name, address and phone number match your website exactly.
3. 3.Clean up your listings. Check the major directories and the ones specific to your industry. Correct old addresses, disconnected numbers and duplicate listings.
4. 4.Make asking for reviews a habit. Ask every happy customer, send a direct link so it takes them a minute, and reply to reviews, including the critical ones. Don’t buy reviews or offer anything in exchange for them; Google’s review policies prohibit both.
5. 5.Rewrite the top of your key pages. For each main service, open with one or two sentences that say what you do, where you do it and who it’s for. Add a short FAQ built from the questions customers ask on the phone.
6. 6.Add structured data. At minimum, LocalBusiness markup with your name, address, phone number and hours, plus FAQ markup that matches the questions shown on the page.
7. 7.Check that crawlers can reach you. Make sure robots.txt isn’t blocking the search and AI crawlers you want to be found by, and that your main content appears as real text on the page.
8. 8.Earn a few local mentions. Join the chamber, sponsor a youth team, offer a quote to a local reporter. Each one is another independent source that says you exist and do good work.

What you can’t control

Be wary of anyone who promises you a spot in AI answers. These tools change frequently, the same question can get a different answer from one day to the next, and no business outside the platform controls what they say. We don’t guarantee rankings or AI citations, and you shouldn’t trust anyone who does.

What you can control is the quality of the evidence. Every item on the list above also helps your regular Google rankings, and it makes your business easier to choose once a customer lands on your site. That is why the work pays off even before you measure a single AI answer.

Want a second set of eyes?

This is the work we do every day for local service businesses in Gilbert, across the Phoenix metro and for remote clients: local SEO, websites built to be read by people and machines, and automated review requests and follow-up.

If you’d like to know where you stand, our free audit looks at your website, your listings and the competitors showing up ahead of you, and tells you what to fix first.