A customer sits in a parked car outside a flooded kitchen and types a question into ChatGPT: who should I hire to fix a slab leak near me? Ten seconds later, she has three names. Yours is not one of them.
That is not a ranking problem, at least not the kind small business owners have been trained to worry about. Nobody outbid you. Nobody outspent you. The assistant could not confirm enough about your business to feel comfortable putting your name in a sentence, so it named three businesses it could confirm.
Here is the part that surprises most owners. The assistant is not evaluating whether you are good at your job. It has no way to know that. It is running a quick credibility check to decide whether your business is legitimate and whether the basic facts line up well enough that recommending you is a safe bet. Most small businesses fail that check on details they could fix in an afternoon.
These are the nine things that check looks at, plus a 10-minute test you can run before lunch.
Why “Who Should I Hire” Became a Discovery Channel
For 20 years, local discovery meant a list of links. You could sit in eighth position and still get the call, because the customer scanned the whole page and made up her own mind.
An AI assistant does not hand back a page. It hands back an answer, and that answer usually contains two or three names. There is no eighth position. You are either in the sentence, or you are invisible.
That compresses everything. It also changes what wins. A list of links rewards relevance. A single spoken answer rewards confidence because the system will only name a business it can verify from multiple directions. Ambiguity used to cost you a few positions. Now it costs you the whole answer.
The 9 Checks
1—Your name, category, and location match everywhere. If your website says Cascade Plumbing and Drain, your Google listing says Cascade Plumbing LLC, and an old directory still says Cascade Plumbing and Heating, a machine does not see one business with strong evidence. It sees three businesses with weak evidence each. Pick the exact name you want to be known by and make it identical everywhere you control, down to the punctuation.
2—Your Google Business Profile is complete and correctly categorized. Category is the field owners get wrong most often. A dental practice listed under Dentist when the revenue is in implants will not surface for implant questions. Your primary category should match the job you actually want to be called for, and your secondary categories should cover the rest. Google publishes its own rules for choosing them, and working through those rules takes about 20 minutes.
3—Your service pages answer the question directly. Most service pages open with a paragraph about being family-owned since 1998 and mention the actual service somewhere around paragraph four. Assistants extract answers. They do not dig. If a customer asks whether you handle emergency lockouts at night, the page should say near the top that you handle emergency lockouts at night, which towns you serve, and how fast you arrive.
4—You state a price or a range. This is the item owners resist hardest and the one that moves the needle most. You do not need to publish a full price list. “Diagnostic visit $89, most repairs between $250 and $900” is enough. A business with no pricing signal anywhere is harder to recommend than one with an honest range, because the answer doesn’t tell the customer whether you fit what she asked for.
5—Your reviews are recent. Recency beats volume. Forty reviews, with the newest one from 2023, read like a business that may have closed. Six reviews from the past two months read like a business that is obviously running. A steady trickle is worth more than a burst followed by two years of silence.
6—A real, named person is accountable on the About page. “Our team of experts” is not a person. A named owner, with a photograph and two sentences of genuine background, gives a verification anchor, something that can be checked against a license board or a professional profile. Anonymous businesses are structurally harder to trust, and machines treat them accordingly.
7—Your facts are marked up in structured data. This is the only genuinely technical item on the list, and it is worth handing to whoever maintains your site. Structured data is a standard way of labeling your name, address, hours, and services so that software can read them as data rather than infer them from paragraph text. The vocabulary is public and free for anyone to use.
8—Your hours and service area are accurate. Wrong holiday hours are not a rounding error. One stale “permanently closed” flag, or a service area claiming the whole state when you really cover two towns, quietly removes you from a large set of questions. Check both seasonally, and always after anything changes.
9—A stranger can verify your proof without calling you. Testimonials signed with a first initial, awards with no issuing body, the word “certified” with no certificate: none of it survives a credibility check. If you claim it, tie it to something on a domain you do not own. The Federal Trade Commission’s guidance on endorsements and reviews is a useful standard to hold your own marketing to, and it is stricter than most owners expect.
The 10-Mnute Self-Test
Open a private browser window so your own history does not flatter you, then do four things.
- Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity the question your best customer would ask. Not your company name. The job. “Best emergency roofer in Modesto.” “Who does Invisalign near Fremont?” Note whether you appear at all.
- Now ask the assistant what it knows about your business by name. This one is uncomfortable and useful in equal measure. You will usually get a confident summary that is subtly wrong: an old address, a service you dropped two years ago, a category that never really fit. Whatever it gets wrong is what the internet is currently telling it about you.
- Open your Google Business Profile and your website side by side. Read the name, category, phone, hours, and service area as a stranger hunting for contradictions, not as the person who wrote them. Write down every mismatch.
- Search your business name plus your city, and look only at results on domains you do not control. That is your verifiable evidence. If there is almost nothing there, you have found the real gap.
Most owners turn up three or four fixable problems inside 10 minutes. None of this is glamorous work. It is usually the highest-return work available to a small business right now.
One Honest Caveat
Nobody controls what an AI system says about a business. Not you, not your agency, not anyone selling you a package.
These are third-party products that change their behavior without notice. None of them sells a placement, and none of them offers a citation that anyone can promise you. If an agency guarantees you rankings in AI Overviews or citations in ChatGPT, it is guaranteeing something it does not own, and you should treat that as disqualifying rather than impressive.
What the nine checks actually do is narrower and more durable. They improve the probability that an AI system can correctly understand, verify, cite, and recommend your business when it is genuinely relevant to what someone asked. You are not buying a position. You are removing the reasons a machine would hesitate to say your name out loud.
That distinction is worth holding on to, because it is also the difference between work that keeps paying off as these systems change and work that stops paying off the moment they do.
Jagdeep Singh is the founder and lead Answer Engine Optimization strategist at AI Search Rankings, an AEO agency in Fremont, California. He has 12+ years of experience in SEO and digital marketing, previously leading SEO at Stanford Health Care, Cisco, and Dignity Health, and creating the 47-factor AI Answer Readiness Score.
Photo courtesy Alex Shuper for Unsplash+