How a small Alberta business gets named in ChatGPT and Google AI answers

AI answers are now where a lot of customers start

Google says AI Overviews has more than 2.5 billion monthly users, and that its AI Mode has passed one billion ¹. So when someone needs a welder, a bookkeeper or a furnace repair in your town, the answer often arrives as a short paragraph with a few links, instead of a page of ten blue links.

That changes what being findable is worth. Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of 900 American adults for a month in 2025. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a search result in 8% of visits. When no summary appeared, they clicked in 15% of visits ².

They also quit sooner. People ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, against 16% of pages with only normal results ³. Fewer clicks are going around, so being the business the answer names matters more than it used to.

AI answers are built on ordinary search results

ChatGPT, Google and Perplexity answer questions about your town by searching the live web and reading pages. They are not remembering your business from training. They are looking it up while the customer waits.

That means the old search system still decides it. Google says a page has to be indexed and allowed to show a snippet before it can appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode ⁴. If your website is invisible in Google Search today, it is invisible in the AI answer too.

There is also no secret file. Google says you do not need to create new machine readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in these features, and that there is no special schema.org structured data to add ⁵. If someone is selling you an llms.txt file as the fix, that is the part you can skip.

Check that you have not blocked the robots that name you

Every AI company sends its own crawler. OpenAI says sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links ⁶. Perplexity says its PerplexityBot is there to surface and link websites in its search results ⁷.

These search robots are separate from the ones that collect training data. Blocking GPTBot tells OpenAI not to train on your content, which is a fair choice to make, but it is not the robot that decides whether ChatGPT can name you ⁶. A lot of sites have blocked both by accident, usually because a developer or a security plugin added a blanket rule.

Type your own address followed by /robots.txt into a browser and read what comes up. If you see your site blocking everything with AI in the name, that is a decision somebody made for you. Google now has a toggle in Search Console for its AI features as well, and says sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from those features ¹.

Your map listing and your reviews do most of the local work

For anything with a town or a near me in it, the answer leans on local business data. Google explains local ranking as relevance, distance and prominence, and says prominence means how well-known a business is ⁸. Its own help page says that is partly based on how many websites link to you and how many reviews you have, and that more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking ⁸.

So a claimed, filled-in Google Business Profile is not an extra. It is the main record the machines read about you. Hours, service area, categories, photos and a phone number that actually rings your shop.

Then keep the details identical everywhere. Google asks for a precise, accurate address or service area ⁹, and for a name that matches the one on your storefront, your website and your invoices. Two spellings of your street, an old cell number on a directory, or a different business name on Facebook all give the machine a reason to name a competitor it is more sure about.

Put the facts in plain text on your own site

An AI answer can only repeat what it can read. Put your service area, your hours, what you charge or a price range, the brands you work on and whether you do emergency calls in words on the page, not inside a photo, a PDF or a booking widget.

Structured data helps line those facts up. Google says that with Local Business structured data you can tell it about business hours, different departments and reviews ¹⁰. It is not required for AI answers ⁵, but it is cheap for a web person to add, and it is how your hours and location get shown properly in Search and Maps. Keep it matching the visible text, because Google treats that as a best practice.

A short honest page for each service and each town you really serve beats one long page that mentions everything once. Write the way a customer asks the question, then answer it in the first two lines.

Buying reviews is a legal risk in Canada

When you learn that reviews feed the answer, the shortcut is obvious and tempting. Do not take it. The Competition Bureau says there are problems with what look like third party testimonials when there is an undisclosed material connection, financial or otherwise, between that person and the advertiser, such as an employee ¹¹.

That covers staff reviews, review swaps with a friendly business, and anything bought online. It is deceptive marketing, not marketing.

The slow version works and nobody can take it away from you. Ask every customer for a review at the moment the job is finished and they are happy, by text, with the link already in it. A steady trickle of real reviews with real detail in them is exactly what prominence is built from ⁸.

What actually changes the answer

Research on this is still new. The best known paper, posted in 2023 and accepted to the KDD 2024 conference, tested content changes against generative search engines and reported gains of up to 40% in visibility. The same abstract says how well those changes work varies by topic, so there is no single trick ¹².

Treat anyone who guarantees you a spot in ChatGPT as a warning sign. The vendors themselves do not promise placement. The answers differ from one person to the next, and they change week to week. What you can control is whether the facts about your business are crawlable, consistent and true.

Start with four things this month: read your robots.txt, claim and finish your Google profile, fix every place your name, address or phone is wrong, and ask the next ten customers for a review. Then search for yourself in ChatGPT and in Google, from your phone, once a month, and write down what it says.

Most of this needs no custom software. A claimed profile, a website you can edit yourself, and a review request that goes out after every job are all ready-made and cheap. Custom work only earns its price when the facts an answer needs live inside a system of yours, like live availability, stock or job status, and have to reach your website without anybody retyping them.