Somewhere right now, a potential client is asking ChatGPT to recommend a business exactly like yours. The answer comes back with two or three names. Is your business one of them?
According to BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, 45% of consumers used AI tools like ChatGPT to find local business recommendations in the past year. One year earlier, that number was 6%. And yet almost nobody is showing up in those answers. SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index analyzed more than 350,000 business locations and found that ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of them.
Read those two stats together, and you’ll see what I see: a door standing wide open. Your potential clients are already asking AI for recommendations, and almost none of your competitors have figured out how to be the answer.
The best part? Improving your AI visibility isn’t some brand-new skill you have to learn from scratch. It’s built on things you already understand, like reviews, a clear website, and showing up consistently. You just have to do them with intention. Here are six simple things you can start this month, whether you serve one town or work with clients anywhere in the world.
Start by Asking AI What It Says About You
Before you change anything, ask AI where you stand. This takes about five minutes and costs nothing.
But first, a warning that will save you from a false sense of security. If you’re logged into your own account, the AI probably knows about your business from your history, so it may mention you when it wouldn’t mention you to a stranger. Ask from a friend’s account to see what a real potential client sees.
Once you’re set up, open ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity and ask a question your ideal client would ask. If you’re a local business, that might be “best massage therapist in Annapolis.” If you work with clients online, try “best mindset coach for women entrepreneurs” or whatever fits your niche.
Then ask the follow-up question that does all the heavy lifting: “Why didn’t you mention my business?”
The answer is basically a free to-do list. AI will usually tell you exactly what’s missing, whether that’s thin website content, few reviews, or no presence in the directories it checked. I’ve watched business owners get more clarity from that one question than from months of guessing.
Note: My Keyword Strategizer lets you run AI audits on demand, so you don’t need to be logged into a friend’s account to check major LLMs to see if they recommend you.
Complete the Profiles That Matter in Your World
AI tools don’t pull their recommendations out of thin air. They piece together an answer from what they find online, and profiles are among the first places they look.
If you’re a local business, your Google Business Profile comes first. Fill out every section, choose accurate categories, provide a detailed description, add photos, and keep your hours up to date. Then, make sure you also have complete profiles on Yelp, Bing Places, and Apple Maps. (Bing matters more than you’d think.) And make sure the name, address (or service area), and phone number on each of those profiles match. If you want to go deeper on the local side, I wrote about how small businesses can outrank corporate giants with local SEO in a previous Leading Lady Coaching guest post.
No storefront? No problem. Your profiles just live in different places. Think LinkedIn, industry directories, professional association listings, and the guest profiles you’ve built up from podcast appearances. An online-only business with a complete, current LinkedIn profile and listings in two or three respected directories gives AI plenty to work with.
The principle is the same either way. Complete and consistent information everywhere AI looks. If your business name is different in three places, AI won’t know which version to trust and might skip you entirely.
Make Your Website Say Plainly Who You Help and What You Do
AI can’t recommend a business it can’t understand.
I see this constantly. A talented business owner has a beautiful website with a vague headline like “Empowering transformation through intentional living.” Lovely sentiment. But when someone asks AI for “a business coach who helps wellness practitioners raise their prices,” that website gives AI absolutely nothing to connect the dots with.
Specificity is what gets you into specific answers. If you’re local, that means naming your services and your area in plain language on your website. If you’re online, your niche does that same job. “I help female physical therapists build cash-based practices” will show up in answers that “I help entrepreneurs grow” never will.
So how do you know what to be specific about? You start with the questions your ideal clients are actually asking. People phrase things differently when they’re talking to AI, with longer, more conversational questions than they’d ever type into Google. If you’ve ever done a Google search and noticed the “People Also Ask” section in the results, those questions are a goldmine for this sort of thing. And when you’re ready to dig deeper, that’s exactly what I built the Keyword Strategizer to do, uncovering the questions and keywords your ideal clients use, with a free trial that doesn’t require a credit card. Once you know the questions, every page and blog post you write can answer one.
Keep Reviews and Testimonials Flowing
Something most business owners don’t realize: AI reads your reviews. The actual words, not only the star rating.
When a past client writes “she helped me finally launch my group program after two years of overthinking it,” AI now has evidence connecting your business to that specific outcome. That’s the kind of detail that turns you from a name on a list into a recommendation.
For local businesses, that means a steady stream of Google reviews. Steady is key, because a burst of ten reviews followed by a year of silence looks odd to both Google and AI. Ask consistently, and respond to every review you get, good or bad. Yelp reviews also matter more than most people think, partly because Apple Maps and Bing pull their reviews from Yelp in the US, but Yelp discourages asking for reviews, so your best move there is simply keeping your listing claimed and accurate.
For online businesses, your version of this is LinkedIn recommendations, testimonials on your website, and results you can point to publicly. Case studies and project overviews with client quotes and specific results also give AI even more to work with.
Get Mentioned on Other Websites
AI trusts businesses that other people vouch for. Your own website saying you’re wonderful is a claim. Someone else’s website saying it is evidence.
If you serve a local area, look to your chamber of commerce, community organizations, local publications, and the small-business roundups that run on regional blogs and news sites. These mentions tell AI you’re a real, established part of your community.
If you’re an online business, you may already be doing this without realizing it counts. Every podcast you guest on creates a page with your name, your niche, and usually a link. Every guest post does the same thing. (Yes, including this one. You’re watching the strategy in action!) Industry roundups, collaborations, and speaker pages all add to the pattern AI uses to decide you’re credible.
You don’t need dozens of these. A handful of genuine mentions on relevant sites beats a hundred spammy directory listings.
And some of the sites AI cites most are ones you can show up on yourself. A recent analysis of 30 million AI citations found that Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn top the list across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI tools. LinkedIn is straightforward: posts sharing your expertise are tied to your name and business. Reddit works differently: you participate as a person, not a brand, but you can include your info in your profile. The win there isn’t posting about your business. It’s becoming a known, helpful voice in the communities where your ideal clients ask questions, so that when someone asks for recommendations in your area or niche, your business is the one that gets named in the thread. Those threads are exactly what AI reads.
Bonus: Answer One Question on YouTube
I saved the most surprising one for last, because the data here might change how you think about video.
An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found that YouTube mentions showed the strongest correlation with AI visibility among the factors they measured, ahead of every traditional SEO signal. Now, correlation isn’t proof of causation, and businesses that show up on YouTube tend to be doing plenty of other things right too. But the pattern is hard to ignore.
Here’s the part that should make you smile if you’ve ever thought “I can’t compete on YouTube.” OtterlyAI’s research on AI citations found that about 41% of the YouTube videos cited by AI tools had fewer than 1,000 views, and the correlation between view count and getting cited was essentially zero. AI doesn’t care whether your video is popular. It cares whether your video clearly answers a question.
That means the coach with 43 subscribers and a video titled “How to price your first group program” can get cited right alongside the channels with millions of views.
If you want to try this, keep it simple. Pick the one question clients ask you most often. Answer it in a plain 5- to 10-minute video with a clear, descriptive title, and add chapters so AI can point to specific moments. One honest note: this matters most for Google’s AI results, less so for other tools, and it’s completely optional. If being on camera makes you miserable, you can try answering in a way that doesn’t require showing your face, such as a slideshow or screen share. Otherwise, skip it and pour that energy into the other five steps.
The Door Is Open. Walk Through It.
None of this requires learning to code, hiring an agency, or becoming a marketing expert. Even better, each of these steps also strengthens your regular Google visibility. Nothing on this list is wasted effort, even if AI search evolves (and it will).
If you only do one thing this week, do the five-minute AI audit and find out what it says about you. Then start with the questions, because everything else builds on knowing what your ideal clients are actually asking. The Keyword Strategizer free trial gives you a handful of keyword searches to uncover exactly that, no credit card needed.
Remember, only about 1 in 100 businesses is showing up in AI recommendations right now. The bar is low, the tools are free or close to it, and the businesses that start now will be the ones AI already trusts by the time everyone else catches on.
