Ask ChatGPT for a good plumber, nail salon, or taco place in your town, and you get a short answer with a few names. If your business is one of them, great. If it isn't, that customer probably never hears about you, because there's no second page to scroll to.

A marketing company called SOCi measured how often businesses get named. Out of about 350,000 business locations in the US, ChatGPT recommended 1.2%. Google's map results, the three businesses that show up when you search "near me," included 35.9%. SOCi studied chain and franchise locations, not one-person shops, and it sells marketing services, so don't treat the exact numbers as gospel. The gap is still hard to ignore.

And customers are asking. In a February survey of 2,202 US adults, paid for by Yelp, 57% said they use AI tools to find local businesses at least once a month.

Where the AI gets its answer

ChatGPT doesn't know your business. When someone asks for a local recommendation, it searches the web and pulls from your website, your business listings, and review sites. Gemini, made by Google, leans on Google Maps.

The biggest change came this summer. On July 23, Axios reported that Yelp had signed a deal to license its reviews, ratings, photos, and business details to OpenAI. ChatGPT can now show that information right inside its answers to local questions, with Yelp's name and a link attached.

That deal matters because of another number in the SOCi study. The average business answers 46.9% of its Google reviews and only 3.1% of its Yelp reviews. A lot of owners gave up on Yelp years ago, and now it's feeding ChatGPT.

A weekend checklist

None of this needs an agency, and all of it is free.

Start with Google Business Profile, since that's what Gemini and Google Maps use. Fill in every field: hours, services, the towns you cover, photos. Once it's verified, go to Bing Places and pick "Import from Google Business Profile," which copies your details over in a few minutes. Bing is on the list because several firms that track this say ChatGPT relies heavily on Bing and Yelp data for local questions.

Then claim your Yelp page at biz.yelp.com. A lot of owners stay away from Yelp because they think it's pay-to-play. Claiming your page is free, and it doesn't sign you up for ads. Once it's yours, make the name, address, phone number, hours, and services match your Google listing exactly. If one says you close at 6 and the other says 5, you're handing the AI two answers and no way to know which one is true.

While you're on Yelp, answer your reviews, starting with the recent ones and the bad ones. A short, calm reply to a complaint tells the next customer that someone is paying attention. In SOCi's data, the locations ChatGPT recommended averaged 4.3 stars, and SOCi says reviews work more like a gate you have to get through than a score that ranks you.

There's a catch most owners don't know about. Yelp tells businesses not to ask customers for reviews, and its software may hide reviews that look like the business asked for them. So the friendly "leave us a review on Yelp!" sign by the register can backfire. Ask your happy customers for a Google review instead, and let Yelp reviews come on their own.

Next, make sure there's plain text somewhere that says what you do, where you do it, and roughly what it costs. AI tools read words. A photo of your price list, or a menu that only exists as an image, may be invisible to them. If you have a website, put it there, along with answers to the questions customers ask you on the phone every week. If you don't have one, that's fine. Put the same plain-English details in the description and services sections of your Google and Yelp listings, since those are what the AI reads anyway.

Finally, check how you're doing. Open ChatGPT and Gemini and ask the way a customer would: "Who's a good [your service] in [your town]?" Try a few different wordings, because the answers change. Write down who shows up and what the AI says about them, then ask again in a month.

What nobody can promise you

Plenty of agencies now sell "AI visibility" packages for a monthly fee. Be careful with those. Nobody outside OpenAI or Google controls who gets named, and the answer can change from one question to the next. Most of what an agency will actually do for you is the list above.

It also helps to know that customers don't fully trust these answers either. In the same Yelp survey, only 15% said they trust AI search results "a lot," and 63% said they double-check them against other sources. So even when ChatGPT does name you, the customer will probably go read your reviews and look at your listing before they call. That's one more reason the listings and the review replies are worth your weekend, even before any AI starts sending people your way.