What ChatGPT says when someone asks who to hire in your town

A homeowner asks ChatGPT who can retile a bathroom in their town, and whether they are any good. The answer is three names with a sentence about each. There is no second page. Your business is either in that answer or it is not, and the same is true of Claude, Perplexity and the AI overview at the top of Google.

You cannot buy a place in that answer. An assistant builds it from what it can read, and if it finds nothing specific about you, it names someone else.

How an assistant chooses

Google shows ten links and lets the searcher choose. An assistant makes the choice itself. To do that it needs facts it can put into a sentence: what the business does, where, for whom, on what price basis, when it is open and what customers said afterwards.

Some assistants search the web while the person waits and read the pages they find. Others answer from what they read months ago. Either way the material is the same: your website, your Google Business Profile, directories, review sites and anything written about you elsewhere. The assistant compares all of it with the question, and the business whose pages answer the question most directly gets named.

There is no form to fill in and no fee to pay. It comes down to what is written, and where.

What it reads

The pages that get quoted tend to share a few things.

• One page per type of job, with the area written out. Not "cleaning services" but "end-of-tenancy cleaning in Kaunas and the surrounding district".
• A price basis, even without a price: per square metre, per hour, per visit, or from a stated amount. An assistant will not invent a number, so a page without one is described as "contact for pricing", which is a weaker sentence than your competitor gets.
• Opening hours, phone number and address as text on the page, not inside an image or a PDF.
• Reviews next to the job they describe, so the assistant can say what was done and how it went, not just count stars.
• Structured data: a small block of code that labels your name, address, hours, services and common questions so a machine can read them without guessing. Most website builders have a setting for it, and a developer can add it in an afternoon.
• The same name, address and hours everywhere. When your site says one thing and Google says another, the assistant hedges, or picks a business that gives it no reason to.

Why "we do everything" pages get skipped

Owners write broad pages because they do not want to turn a client away. Assistants read broad pages as saying nothing in particular.

Someone asking who fits kitchen countertops wants a workshop that fits kitchen countertops. A page that lists countertops, staircases, window sills, fireplaces and headstones in one paragraph matches that question weakly. A page about countertops alone matches it strongly and gets the sentence.

Assistants also drop what they cannot check. "Top quality", "years of experience" and "an individual approach" are not facts an assistant can repeat. "Quartz and granite countertops, templated on site, fitted within two weeks of templating" is something it can quote word for word.

What you can publish this week

You can do this yourself in an afternoon, starting from an honest list of what you do.

• Pick the three types of job that pay best. Write one page for each: what it is, where you do it, how you price it, what happens after the first call, and the two questions callers always ask. Plain sentences.
• Put your hours, phone number, address and service area as text at the bottom of every page.
• Ask your last few clients for a Google review, and reply to each one by naming the job. Your reply gets read too.
• Copy the two questions from each page into the questions section of your Google Business Profile.
• Make sure your text is real text: try selecting it with the mouse. If you cannot, neither can an assistant.

See what it says about you now

Before you write anything, look at today's answer. The AI visibility check on this site shows what an assistant says about your business now, next to what it could say. Read it the way a customer would. Something will be wrong, something will be missing, or you will not be there at all, and that tells you which page to write first.

Nobody controls how an assistant words its answer, and answers change without notice. What you control is whether there is accurate information for it to read, which is exactly what the pages above provide. AI-SEO as a service takes the same idea further: the facts are structured so a machine can quote them, the listings assistants rely on are filled in, and the answers are checked every month, so you see the change yourself instead of hearing about it from a customer.