How to Get Your Business Found by AI

More and more, your next customer is not typing into Google. They are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to recommend someone who does what you do, and the AI hands them a short list. The question worth losing a little sleep over: is your name on it?

I gave a version of this at a networking luncheon recently (the recap is here), and the same thing happened that always happens. Sharp, established business owners realized they had no idea what AI says about them. So here is the whole thing, in plain language.

AI does not guess. It pulls.

Here is the good news buried under all the hype. AI does not make up what it says about your business. It pulls from four places, and you can influence every one of them:

• Your Google Business Profile
• Your reviews
• Your website
• What other sites say about you

Know the inputs, control the output. That is the entire game.

The 60-second check: what does AI say about you?

Before you fix anything, see what is actually there. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity and ask these two questions:

1. "What do people say about [your business name] in [your city]?"
2. "Recommend a [what you do] near [your city], and tell me why."

About 8 out of 10 businesses I check come back with a shrug or silence. If that is you, do not spiral. It is fixable. When you run the check, one of three things is true right now:

• AI recommends you. Protect it.
• AI gets you wrong. Fix the sources, because it can only repeat what the sources say.
• AI has never heard of you. Build the sources.

Three moves that close most of the gap

1. Write for the questions, not the keywords.

Nobody types "best realtor Lynnwood 2026" into ChatGPT. They ask real questions, like how much it costs to sell a house. Take the ten questions your customers actually ask you, and put the answers on your website in plain sentences. One page of real answers beats fifty pages of keyword soup.

2. Recent and trusted beats big and old.

AI leans on recency. A complete Google profile with three reviews from this month beats a fancy website that has been silent since 2023. Ask your last three happy customers for a review this week. It is the highest-paid five minutes of your month.

3. You cannot be your only source.

AI trusts you more when other places back you up. You cannot be the only site that vouches for you, so get listed where your customers and the AI can both find you, starting with a solid local directory or two. I run one, Vantage, and a free listing is a perfectly good place to start.

Where to start

If you do one thing this week, run the free AI visibility check. It takes about a minute, shows your score on screen, and emails you the full report with the specific fixes for your site. Then pick the lowest-hanging one and go.

Search did not die. It learned to answer back. And right now, this window is the cheap, easy land-grab.

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