When someone asks "who's a good bilingual dentist in West Palm Beach?" the assistant doesn't pick from a list of advertisers. It searches, reads what it finds and writes an answer. Your job is to make your business the easiest one to find, read and believe. Here is how we do it for clients, step by step.
How AI assistants choose which business to name
Each assistant works a little differently, but they share a pattern: they pull fresh information from the web and from business listings, then summarize it.
- Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google's own search index. Google's guidance for site owners says a page only needs to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in normal Search, and that there are no additional requirements. In other words, good local SEO is the entry ticket.
- ChatGPT search uses OpenAI's own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, to find websites. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that block it won't be shown in ChatGPT's search answers, and recommends allowing it.
- Local questions lean heavily on business listings. For Google, that means your Business Profile.
So there are two things to get right: being readable by the machines, and being the most convincing answer once you are read.
Step 1: let the crawlers in
This sounds obvious, but we find it broken more often than you would expect. A website's robots.txt file tells crawlers what they may read. Some hosting setups, security plugins and CDN settings block bots by default, including the ones that feed AI search.
Check three things, or ask whoever runs your site:
- Your robots.txt does not block Googlebot or OAI-SearchBot.
- Your hosting or firewall is not challenging bots with a CAPTCHA page.
- Your important text is real text on the page, not baked into images or loaded only after someone clicks.
A note on Google-Extended: it controls whether Google may use your content for training and grounding in some of its other AI products. Google's guidance treats it as separate from how you appear in Search.
Step 2: complete your Google Business Profile
For local questions, the Business Profile is the source assistants and Google's own results lean on most. Google's help page on local ranking names three factors: relevance (how well your profile matches the search), distance and prominence (how well known you are, including links and reviews). It also says complete and accurate profiles are more likely to show.
Fill in every field that applies: primary and secondary categories, the services you offer with a line on each, your service area, hours, photos of your real team and work, and both languages if you serve both. Our local SEO work starts here, and the one-time Google Business Profile setup is $199 on our pricing page.
Step 3: write pages that answer the question in the first lines
AI answers quote and summarize. They favour pages where the answer is easy to lift: a direct statement near the top, specific facts, and one topic per page.
What that looks like on a small business site:
- One page per service. "Dental implants in West Palm Beach" gets its own page instead of a line on a services list.
- The answer first. Open with who it is for, where you do it, what it costs or how pricing works, and how to book.
- Real specifics. Prices or price ranges, insurance accepted, languages spoken, areas served, how long things take.
- Questions customers actually ask, answered on the page in plain words. Your front desk knows them by heart.
This is also what ranks in normal Google results, which is the point: the same work pays twice. If your current site is one long page, a custom build with a page per service is usually the biggest single fix.
Step 4: make your details match everywhere
Assistants cross-check. If your website says one phone number, your Google profile another and an old directory listing a third, you look less certain. Keep your business name, phone, website and service area identical on your site, your Google profile, Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp, Facebook and the directories in your field.
For a service-area business, list the areas you serve rather than a street address you don't receive customers at. Our one-time Local Search Launch ($299) sets up and matches these listings.
Step 5: earn reviews that say what you do
Reviews feed prominence, and Google's local ranking help says more reviews and positive ratings can help. For AI answers, the words inside the reviews matter too, because they are text the assistant reads about you.
Ask every customer right after the visit or the job, and make it one tap. A review that says "they fixed our AC the same day in Boca" tells a machine what you do and where. You can't script reviews, and you should never buy them or ask only the customers you expect to be happy, but you can ask customers to mention what you did for them. Our review engine, $79 a month inside our AI agents, sends that request after every visit or job.
Step 6: structured data, kept honest
Google says no special schema is needed for its AI features. We still add LocalBusiness and FAQ markup to client sites because it describes your name, services, area and hours in a format machines read without guessing. The rule is that it has to match what the page shows. Markup that claims things the page doesn't say is a liability.
What doesn't work
- Paying for placement. It isn't offered inside these answers, and Google says there is no way to pay for a better local ranking.
- Pages stuffed with city names. Twenty near-identical "dentist in [city]" pages read as spam to people and to search engines.
- Fake or bought reviews. They break platform rules and can get a profile suspended.
- Hiding everything behind a chatbot or a PDF. If the facts aren't on the page as text, they aren't in the answer.
How to check where you stand
Do this once a month and write the results down:
- Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google in a private window.
- Ask the questions your customers ask, the way they ask them: "best bilingual dentist near Wellington", "who does AC repair same day in Plano", "agencia de seguros que hable español en Hialeah".
- Note who gets named, and what sources the assistant links to.
- Compare those sources with yours: their Google profile, their reviews, their service pages.
The gap is usually visible in an afternoon. If you want help reading it, our free Lead Leak Audit is a good start, and on a call we run these questions with you.
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