6% 45%
use AI to find a local business
One year. ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI answers went from a rounding error to nearly half of local searches.
AI visibility
When it answers, be the name it gives.
People are asking AI who to call, and getting back a couple of names instead of ten blue links. Either your business is one of them or, as far as that person is concerned, it does not exist.
What changed
There is no second page to be on.
A results page has ten positions and a next button. An answer names two or three businesses and stops. Everybody else is not on page two, they are simply absent, and the person asking never learns they were an option.
83% 71%
Google's share of local discovery
Still the biggest by a wide margin, but the first real drop. The searching did not stop. It spread out.
That is one year of movement. Whatever got you found in 2024 was built for a different shape of question.
How it decides
It checks whether your story holds up.
AI will not take your website's word for it. Before it puts your name in an answer, it looks for the same business described the same way somewhere else.
Nothing on the right is a penalty. It is just a business that has given a machine no way to be sure about it, so the machine picks one it is sure about instead. Almost all of this work is fixing that.
The work
Five things, in this order.
- 01
Make the story match everywhere
Same business name, same phone number, same services, same towns, on your site, your Google profile and every directory that lists you. This is unglamorous and it is the single biggest reason a business gets skipped. It also means the technical side, the code that describes your business to a machine, agreeing with everything else rather than contradicting it.
- 02
Get named somewhere other than your own site
A business that only ever describes itself is one source. A business the chamber of commerce lists, a supplier links to, and the local paper mentions is several, and several is what it takes. This overlaps almost entirely with the local SEO work, which is why it is not a separate bill.
- 03
Keep reviews arriving
Reviews are customers describing you in their own words, on a platform nobody suspects you of controlling. That is the most credible corroboration available to a local business, and the only one that keeps producing itself once the system is running.
- 04
Answer the actual questions, plainly
What you charge, how long it takes, what is included, where you go. AI can only repeat something specific enough to be worth repeating. Pages that dodge the question have nothing quotable in them.
- 05
Then check whether it worked
The questions your customers would really ask, put to ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode on a schedule, recording whether you come up, how you get described, and who gets named instead. Nobody can see inside these systems, so asking them is the measurement.
Pricing
Included, never a second invoice.
Included in every Local SEO plan at no extra cost. Available on its own as a one-time entity and AI visibility audit. Selling it separately would mean charging you twice for one job. Getting your details consistent, your profile right and your name onto other people's sites is what earns a map pack position, and it is the same work that makes AI confident enough to name you.
Local SEO at From $850/mo is where it lives. If you only want this piece, the standalone version is a one-time entity and AI visibility audit, scoped and fixed-priced after we see what you have.
Questions
The ones I actually get asked.
What is AI visibility, and is it the same as AEO or GEO?
AI visibility is whether your business gets mentioned when somebody asks AI a question you should be the answer to. You will also see it called AEO (answer engine optimization), GEO (generative engine optimization), LLMO, or AI SEO. They describe the same goal and the industry has not settled on one term. I say AI visibility because it is plain English and it says what you are actually buying.
Does this matter for a local business in Bryan or College Station?
More than it did a year ago. BrightLocal's 2026 survey found 45% of consumers now use AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before, while Google's share of local discovery fell from 83% to 71%. That is a real shift in one year, in exactly the category a local business competes in.
Is this a different service from SEO?
Not really, and Google says the same thing: optimizing for its AI features is still SEO, because those features run on the same systems as regular search. The parts that genuinely differ are making your business unmistakable across every source that describes it, and measuring whether AI actually names you. That is why this is included in a Local SEO plan rather than sold as a separate product at a separate price.
How do you measure it?
A fixed set of prompts, the questions your customers would actually ask, run across the major AI tools on a schedule, recording whether you are mentioned, how you are described, and who gets named instead. It is closer to brand tracking than rank tracking, and it is the only way to know whether any of this is working.
How much does it cost?
Included in every Local SEO plan at no extra cost. Available on its own as a one-time entity and AI visibility audit. Charging separately would be billing twice for one job, because the work that earns you a map pack position is most of the work that gets you cited.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend my business?
No, and neither can anyone else. There is no submission form, no ranking dial and no paid placement. What I can do is remove the reasons a model would get you wrong or skip you: contradictory business data, thin or unanswerable content, no third-party corroboration, and no measurement.
Free audit
Find out what a machine sees.
The audit covers your site's performance, your Google Business Profile, and whether AI can work out what your business is and where it works. It runs automatically and lands in your inbox in about three minutes.
If everything already lines up and there is nothing worth fixing, I will tell you that.