Does ChatGPT recommend you when someone looks for your trade in your city?

Ask ChatGPT for an emergency plumber in Valencia or a dentist with good reviews in Alicante, and you will not get a page of ten search results. You get two or three business names, with a short explanation.

So AI search visibility no longer comes from traditional SEO alone. It comes from AI models finding clear, consistent information about your brand online, and from the signals that help them trust it. This guide explains how AI search works and what you can do, step by step, to improve your visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews.

Your business can appear in an AI answer in three different ways: as a name in the text, as a link the reader can open, or as a listing with a map for local searches.

All three rely on the same signals. AI models need to understand who you are, what service you offer and where you work. Then they check other websites for the same information: these signals help models decide which brands to trust.

Some digital marketing agencies call this generative engine optimisation, or GEO. In practice it means building your visibility in traditional search engines and in AI search at the same time. A good SEO strategy is still the foundation of your AI visibility.

ChatGPT does not keep a list of recommended companies. Its answers combine what the model learned before release with a live web search at the moment of the question.

For local questions, such as an electrician in Elche who works on Saturdays, the search side matters most. ChatGPT queries external search engines, Bing being the best known, plus its own crawler. Then it builds the answer from the information it finds most reliable.

That information usually comes from business directories like Google Business Profile, Bing Places and Páginas Amarillas, from review platforms, from business websites with clear content, and from local media and blogs. Our own measurements, shown above, place directories among the most cited sources.

Gemini and Google's AI Overviews work in a similar way, but they draw on the Google index and its local business information. Perplexity always lists where its answers come from. The same information feeds every AI engine, so it has to be consistent on every platform.

If search engines cannot reach your pages, AI models cannot cite them. Go through these points with whoever looks after your website, like a quick SEO audit of your online presence:

• Let the crawlers in. Your robots.txt file should not shut out Googlebot, Bingbot or OAI-SearchBot, the crawler ChatGPT uses for search (OpenAI documentation).
• Add your website to Bing. Register it in Bing Webmaster Tools as well as Search Console, submit your sitemap and, if your platform supports it, switch on IndexNow.
• Use text, not images. Opening hours inside a photo or a menu in a PDF are hard for language models to understand. Key content should sit on the page itself, where SEO and AI visibility both start.
• Look after speed. Slow pages are crawled less well. See website speed and search rankings.

It is the most technical part of the strategy, but you only do it once, and it helps your SEO and your rankings too.

To an AI model, your business is a set of information: name, address, phone number, opening hours, services and the area you cover. If that information differs from one website to another, AI hesitates, and when in doubt it suggests someone else.

Google Business Profile

Start with Google Business Profile: precise categories, photos, hours and your full list of services. Our guide on how to appear on Google Maps covers it in detail.

Bing and Apple

Copy the same information to Bing Places, which can import your Google listing, and to Apple Business Connect for Apple Maps and Siri.

Spanish directories

Finish with directories such as Páginas Amarillas and the platforms for your sector, like Doctoralia for dentists or TheFork for restaurants. Your name, address and phone number should look exactly the same on every one. Local SEO calls this NAP consistency: see local citations and NAP and optimise your Google Business Profile.

When someone asks AI for “the best” or “someone I can trust”, reviews are the most direct trust signals it can find. Having lots of them is not enough: what they say matters.

A review that mentions the service and the town, such as “they replaced our boiler in Elda in one morning”, gives AI concrete information to reuse in its answers. So ask for reviews as soon as a job is finished, with a direct link, and spread your presence across Google and the platform for your sector.

Reply to every review, negative ones included, calmly and with facts. Never buy or invent reviews: EU consumer rules ban them and platforms remove them. More ideas in how to get more Google reviews and how to reply to negative reviews.

Generative AI quotes specific sentences. If your website content only says “we offer a quality service”, there is nothing to reuse. What works is clear, structured content that answers your customers' questions, starting with the ones people ask you on the phone.

• One page per service, with the area you cover, as on our trade websites for plumbers or electricians.
• Concrete information: guide prices, lead times, opening hours and contact options.
• Frequently asked questions, each with a clear answer of two or three sentences.
• Structured data of the LocalBusiness type, which tells search engines who you are and what you do (see our Schema LocalBusiness guide).

Write each paragraph so it makes sense on its own, because that is how generative AI extracts an answer. This kind of content helps your SEO and your visibility in AI answers at once, which makes it the core of any content strategy. For the basics, read our local SEO guide.

For AI models, a brand's authority comes from what other websites say about it. A brand mentioned in the local paper, on a professional association's site or in a city guide carries more weight than anything you say about yourself.

Work with other businesses in your area and link to each other where it helps customers. Take part in local events that the press covers. Publish useful advice about your trade on your blog. Keep your social media active, with the same name and contact information as on your website.

This is classic digital marketing. It strengthens your brand, your digital presence and your SEO on Google, and now it also feeds tools like ChatGPT.

Ask the question a customer would ask. Go to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, ideally without being logged in, and try a few different wordings:

• “Which [your trade] would you recommend in [your town]?”
• “I need an urgent [service] in [your area], who should I call?”
• “Who is the best [your trade] in [your town] according to reviews?”

Note which businesses appear, in what order and where the information comes from. Repeat the test every month, as AI answers vary over time and between users. If you would rather we did it for you, fill in the form on this page: we put the question to each AI you tick and email you the result.

Paying to appear. AI recommendations are not for sale, so be wary of anyone promising you a fixed spot in ChatGPT.

Keyword stuffing. Repeating “plumber Valencia” does not convince models that understand natural language, and it hurts your SEO.

Fake reviews. They are banned and, once spotted, they destroy the trust customers and AI models place in your brand.

Expecting instant results. What AI knows about your business updates gradually, so edits to your listings and content take time to show in search.

AI visibility is built like SEO: steadily, with reliable information, useful content and a clear digital marketing strategy. Start with the first step this week and keep going at your own pace.