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FIELD GUIDE 09
The local AI visibility checklist
A year ago almost nobody asked ChatGPT for a plumber. Now nearly half do, and the businesses being recommended are not the ones paying the most for ads.
FIG. 01 · THE FASTEST SHIFT IN LOCAL SEARCH
- 45%of consumers now use AI tools for local business recommendations. BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026.
- from 6%the year before. This is not a trend line, it is a step change, and it happened in twelve months.
The mechanics are different from search. There is no results page and no position three. The assistant reads whatever it can find about you, forms a summary, and either names you or does not. Everything below is about making the raw material good.
Why some businesses get named and others do not
An assistant answering "who is a good electrician near me" is assembling an answer from sources it trusts: your Google Business Profile, your website, review text, directories, and any editorial mention of you. It needs three things to name you confidently.
Existence: consistent, machine-readable facts
Your name, address, phone, hours and service area have to agree everywhere. Contradictory facts make an assistant hedge, and hedging means it names someone else.
Relevance: your services in plain language
The assistant is matching a described need to a described service. If your site says "bespoke solutions" and the customer says "blocked drain", there is nothing to match.
Corroboration: other people saying it too
One website claiming you are the best roofer in town is marketing. Reviews, directories and third-party mentions saying similar things is evidence. Assistants weight corroboration heavily because it is the cheapest defence against being manipulated.
The checklist
Facts an assistant can read
- Name, address and phone identical, character for character, on your site and every profile.
- Hours current, including holidays, in both your profile and your site footer.
- Service area named as actual towns, not a radius or a vague region.
- LocalBusiness schema markup on your site with those same facts. This is the machine-readable version and most service business sites do not have it.
- One canonical page per service, so there is an unambiguous thing to cite.
Language a model can match
- Use the words customers use. "Boiler not firing" beats "heating system diagnostics".
- Answer the actual questions on the page: what it costs, how fast you come, what areas, whether you are insured.
- Put the answer in the first two lines of the section, not after three paragraphs of preamble. Extractive systems take the top of the answer.
- Add an FAQ block covering the ten questions you get on every call.
Corroboration you do not control
- A current review profile. Assistants read review text, not just the star average, and recency matters.
- Consistent listings on the directories that matter in your sector.
- Any genuine third-party mention: local press, a supplier’s installer list, a trade association register, a chamber of commerce page.
- Your Google Business Profile Q&A section filled in. It is short, factual and frequently quoted.
THE TEST THAT TAKES TWO MINUTES
Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI mode and ask each one the question your customer would ask: "who is a good [your trade] in [your town]". Note who gets named and what is said about them. Then ask "tell me about [your business name]" and read the answer carefully. That is your actual starting position, and it is more useful than any audit tool.
What to fix first if the test went badly
| What happened | What it means | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| It had never heard of you | No corroboration at all | Google Business Profile, then reviews, then directories |
| It described you wrongly | Contradictory facts across sources | Fix NAP consistency, then the site copy |
| It named you but vaguely | Services not described in plain terms | One page per service, in customer language |
| It named competitors only | They are better corroborated, not better | Reviews and third-party mentions |
FIG. 03 · SOURCES, CHECKED 2 AUGUST 2026
Every number above was traced to its primary source before publication. Where a widely repeated figure could not be verified at the source, it was cut rather than repeated.
- VerifiedBrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 1,002 US adults. 45% of consumers use AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% in the 2025 survey.
RANKTHREAD
This is the same work, aimed differently
Nothing on this checklist is exotic. It is consistent facts, plain language and third-party corroboration, which is what local search always rewarded. AI just made the cost of getting it wrong immediate.
RANKTHREAD
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