Why your business doesn't show up when someone asks an AI

Somebody in Anderson Township opens ChatGPT and types "who's a good roofer near me". They get three names and a short reason for each. They call one of them. Nobody ever visited a search results page.

That is happening more every month, and most local businesses have no idea whether they are one of the three names or not. Usually they are not, and usually it is for a boring technical reason rather than anything to do with how good they are at roofing.

What an assistant is actually doing

When an AI answers a question like that it is assembling an answer out of sources it can read and trust. It is not browsing your website the way a person does, it is looking for information it can state confidently. So a page that says, in a form a machine can read, "this is a roofing contractor, at this address, serving these towns, with these services and these hours" is a page it can use. A page that only says so in a photo of a truck is not.

That machine readable form is called structured data, and specifically the bit that matters for you is LocalBusiness schema. It is a block of code that sits in the head of your page and states the facts about your business plainly.

How common is missing it?

I scanned 150 independently owned businesses around Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky and 36% of them had no LocalBusiness structured data at all. Trades, law firms, dental practices, manufacturers. More than a third of the local market is invisible to an assistant that is trying to be helpful about them.

The other numbers from that scan tell the same story. 45% never name a city in their title tag, 52% have nothing on the site answering the questions customers actually ask, and 33% have a homepage with under 600 words on it. There is not much there for an assistant to work with even when it wants to.

What to do about it

In rough order of how much difference it makes:

Add LocalBusiness structured data. One block of code in the head of every page. Nothing visible changes for your customers and it is the single biggest thing standing between you and being quotable.

Put your city in your title tag. The title tag is the blue headline in search results and it is the strongest signal on the page. If it says "Home" or just your business name, you are not competing for anybody who typed a place name, which is nearly everybody.

Write your address and phone number out as text. Not in an image, not only in a logo. An assistant cannot read a picture of your phone number, and neither can Google when it is deciding whether you are a real business at a real place.

Answer the questions people actually ask you. Think about the five questions you get on every single phone call. Write a page for each one. That is five pages of content that both a customer and an assistant can use, and it is more than half the businesses around here have.

Is this replacing normal SEO?

No, and be careful with anybody telling you it is. The same things that make you findable in Google make you quotable to an assistant, because both are trying to work out the same facts about you. What has changed is the cost of getting it wrong, since a search result you do not appear in at least shows the user a list, and an AI answer you are not in does not mention you at all.

If you want to know where you currently stand on any of this, I run an audit that checks exactly these things and hands you a fix list in plain English. It is yours to keep and act on whether or not you hire me!