How Service Businesses Get Recommended by ChatGPT and Google AI

A homeowner in Carlsbad with a dead water heater used to type “plumber near me” into Google and scroll. More and more, they ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Overview instead, and get back a short list of names with a reason next to each one. If your business isn’t on that list, the customer never sees your website at all.

The good news is that these tools don’t run on magic. They pull from sources you can see and, mostly, control. Here is what the evidence says they look at, and what to fix first.

Are customers really asking AI for local businesses?

Yes, and quickly. In BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 of 1,002 U.S. adults, 45% said they had used ChatGPT or another AI tool to get local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before. That made AI the third most popular source of local recommendations in the survey.

Trust is catching up too: 40% of respondents said they trust AI platforms to recommend businesses. At the same time, 97% still read reviews before choosing a local business, so the old signals haven’t gone away. They have become the raw material the AI reads.

One caution on these numbers: BrightLocal sells local SEO and review software, and the survey covers U.S. consumers only. The direction is clear even if the exact figure moves.

Where Google’s AI Overviews get their answers

Google has been unusually direct about this. Its guidance on AI features says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations. A page has to be indexed and eligible to show in normal Google Search with a snippet. That’s the bar.

In practice, that means Google’s AI answers sit on top of ordinary Google search. The same things that help you rank help you get pulled into an AI Overview:

• Google can crawl the site, and nothing in your hosting or robots.txt file blocks it.
• The important information is written as text on the page, not locked inside images or PDFs.
• Pages are linked to each other, so Google can find all of them.
• Your Google Business Profile is complete and current, which Google’s guidance names specifically.

Google also says you don’t need new structured data or special “AI text” files to appear in its AI features. If someone is selling you a file that will put you in AI Overviews, that claim contradicts Google’s own documentation.

Where ChatGPT gets its answers

ChatGPT is less transparent, but researchers have looked at the sources it shows. BrightLocal ran 800 local business searches in ChatGPT across 20 industries and 20 U.S. cities and recorded the sources behind each answer. Published as Uncovering ChatGPT Search Sources, it found:

Source type	Share of sources cited
Business websites	58%
Mentions on other sites (news, Wikipedia, articles)	27%
Directories	15%

For buying-intent searches, such as hiring someone, business websites made up 72% of the sources. In other words, your own website is the single biggest thing ChatGPT reads about you. The data was collected in late 2024, and the author notes it is a snapshot, so treat the percentages as a guide rather than a rule.

Reviews matter here too, though the trail is murkier. Whitespark’s research, How to Rank in ChatGPT: Focus on These Review Sites, looked at Bing Places results on the theory that ChatGPT draws on Bing’s data. Across 153 searches in 9 U.S. cities, Facebook and Yelp were the review sources that showed up most often next to businesses. The author is careful to say there is no firm consensus on exactly which data ChatGPT uses. The practical takeaway still holds: don’t rely on Google reviews alone.

Six things to fix first

None of these is new, and that’s the point. AI tools reward the same clarity and consistency that has always won local search. In order of impact for most service businesses:

1. Make your website say exactly what you do, where, and for whom. Open each service page with a plain sentence such as “We repair and replace water heaters for homes in Carlsbad, Oceanside and Vista.” AI tools quote passages like that. Give each main service its own page, rather than listing ten services on one.
2. Complete your Google Business Profile and keep it current. Use the right primary category, accurate hours, a real service area, photos of real work, and the same business name, address and phone number as your website.
3. Claim your Bing Places and Apple Business Connect listings. Many owners have never touched either. In BrightLocal’s 2026 survey, the share of consumers reading reviews on Apple Maps nearly doubled in a year, to 27%, and Bing’s data may feed ChatGPT. Copy your Google details exactly.
4. Earn reviews on more than one platform, and answer them. Google first, then Facebook and Yelp or the platform that leads in your trade. In BrightLocal’s survey, 89% of consumers expect owners to respond to reviews, and 50% are put off by templated or generic replies. Write each reply like a person.
5. Get mentioned by other local sites. Your chamber of commerce, trade associations, suppliers’ “find an installer” pages, local news and community sponsorships all count. Mentions on other sites made up 27% of the sources ChatGPT cited in the BrightLocal study.
6. Make sure machines can read the site. Real text, a working sitemap, nothing blocking crawlers, and pages that load properly on a phone. A beautiful site that hides its content in images gives an AI nothing to quote.

What doesn’t help

A few things get sold to small businesses as “AI SEO” that won’t move anything on their own:

• Special AI files for Google. Google says none are needed for its AI features.
• Stuffing a page with city names and keywords. It reads badly to people, and AI tools look for clear answers, not repetition.
• Buying or faking reviews. It breaks every major platform’s rules and puts the listing you depend on at risk.
• One-off fixes. AI answers change from one day to the next. What holds up is a site and a reputation that stay accurate over months.

How to check where you stand today

You can run a rough check in ten minutes. Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Google, and ask each one the question your best customer would ask, such as “Who’s a good electrician in Carlsbad for a panel upgrade?” Run each question three times, because the answers vary. Write down:

• Whether your business appears, and what the AI says about you.
• Which competitors appear, and what reasons it gives for them.
• Which sources it cites, if it shows them. Those sites are where you need to be listed or mentioned.

If the AI says something wrong about you, the fix is almost always on a page you control: your website or one of your listings isn’t stating that fact plainly enough. Correct it there, then check again in a few weeks.