When Customers Ask AI Instead of Google, Does Your Business Come Up?

By Yurii Vasyliev

Try this tonight. Open ChatGPT, or just type a question into Google, and ask for “a good lawn care company in Tega Cay” or “a dentist in Fort Mill who takes new patients.”

Instead of ten blue links, you will often get a short answer that names two or three businesses and explains why. Many people stop reading right there. If your business is not one of those names, that customer may never know you exist.

I build websites and software for small businesses, and this is the question I hear most often this year: how do we get into those answers? There is no secret switch. AI assistants build their answers from what is already written about you online: your website, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and what other people say about you. The businesses that come up are usually the ones that are easiest to understand from the outside.

Here are five things worth doing this month.

1. Finish your Google Business Profile. Hours, service area, categories, photos and a real description. Google uses this information for its map results and its AI answers alike. Reply to reviews too, including the bad ones. A calm, specific reply tells the next reader more than the star rating does.

2. Write the answers down on your website. An AI cannot repeat what is not written anywhere. If customers always ask whether you serve Lake Wylie, what a typical job costs, or whether you work weekends, put those answers on your site in plain sentences. Not in a photo of a flyer, not only in a Facebook post, and not in a PDF menu. Name the towns you serve: Tega Cay, Fort Mill, Rock Hill, wherever it is.

3. Keep your details identical everywhere. Use the same business name, address and phone number on your website, Google, Facebook, Yelp and any directory you are listed in. When those disagree, people and machines both lose confidence that they have the right business.

4. Publish something regularly. A short post every week or two that answers one real customer question does more than a beautiful homepage that never changes. “What to do with your lawn before the first frost” or “How we price a kitchen remodel” is exactly the kind of page that gets found and quoted. The hard part is keeping it up. Full disclosure: I build a WordPress plugin called Structura that drafts and schedules these posts for small businesses, but a list of customer questions and one hour a month on the calendar works too.

5. Get mentioned around town. What others say about you counts more than what you say about yourself. Sponsoring a youth team, a booth at a festival, joining the chamber, a write-up in the local paper: each of those leaves a trace online that says you are real, local and trusted.

Then check your work. Every couple of months, ask two or three AI assistants the question your customers would ask. See whether you come up, and whether what they say is right. If an answer has your hours wrong or mixes you up with another business, the fix is almost never in the AI itself. It is in whichever page or listing told it the wrong thing.

None of this is really new. It is what has always worked for local businesses: be easy to find, say plainly what you do, and give people a reason to talk about you. The only change is who is listening.

Yurii Vasyliev runs Xerx, an independent web, software and AI development agency, and builds Structura, a WordPress plugin that keeps small business blogs running on a schedule. Local business owners who want to know where their website stands can request a free SEO report from Xerx.