For twenty years, being found online followed a familiar pattern: rank on the first page, get clicked, win the enquiry. That pattern is now shifting.
A growing share of searches ends with an AI-generated answer rather than a list of links – Google’s AI Overviews summarise results directly, while assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are increasingly used to ask for recommendations in plain language.
For national brands, this is a content problem. For local businesses, it is something more fundamental: when someone asks an assistant for a good electrician nearby, the answer is assembled from whatever information about local businesses the model can find and trust. Being visible now means being the business that information points to.
From ranking to being cited
The practical difference is between ranking and being cited. Traditional SEO aimed to place a page as high as possible, so a person would click on it. AI-driven discovery works differently: the assistant reads across multiple sources and produces a single, summarised answer, often naming only two or three businesses.
That compresses the shortlist considerably. Where a searcher might once have scrolled past ten results and formed their own view, they may now be handed out three names and a short reason for each. Getting that set is the new objective, and it depends less on a single optimised page than on the overall picture of your business across the web.
There is a second change worth noting. Because assistants answer in conversation, people ask in fuller sentences – “who can fix a leaking flat roof in south London this week” rather than “roofer london”. Businesses whose online information covers those specifics, including services, service areas and availability, are easier to match that kind of question than those describing themselves in generic terms.
What feeds AI answers about local businesses
The encouraging news for local businesses is that the inputs are mostly familiar. AI tools are drawing on the same signals that have underpinned good local SEO for years – they are simply weighting consistency and corroboration more heavily.
- Accurate, consistent business information – your name, address and phone number matching everywhere they appear. Conflicting details make a business harder to verify, and a model with doubts is more likely to name a competitor it can confirm.
- A complete Google Business Profile – categories, services, hours and location remain a primary source for local information.
- Genuine reviews – both the rating and what customers actually write. Review text is a rich source of detail about what a business does well.
- Structured data – schema markup that states plainly what your business is, where it operates and what it offers, in a form machines can read without guessing.
- Substantive content – pages that clearly answer the questions customers ask, rather than thin marketing copy.
- Corroboration from elsewhere – mentions in directories, trade bodies, local press and supplier sites that independently confirm your business exists and does what it claims.
What local businesses should do now?
None of this requires a dramatic change of strategy, but it does reward doing the basics properly and keeping them current.
Start with an audit of how your business appears across the web and fix anything inconsistent – old numbers, previous addresses, listings you no longer control. Complete your Google Business Profile in full. Build a steady, ethical habit of requesting reviews and replying to them. Add local business schema to your site, so your details are machine-readable. Then invest in content that genuinely answers customer questions, since that is what gets quoted rather than skimmed.
Two habits are worth adopting alongside that. The first is treating your business information as something that needs maintaining rather than setting once: details drift, staff change, services expand, and stale listings quietly undermine everything else. The second is writing plainly. Content packed with marketing language is harder for both people and machines to extract a clear answer from a page that simply states what you do, where you do it and what it costs.
It is also worth testing the reality: ask ChatGPT or Google for a recommendation in your sector and area and see whether you appear. It is a rough check rather than a reliable metric, but it quickly reveals whether the information about your business is clear enough to be picked up. Specialist local seo london support can be useful here for businesses competing in dense urban markets, where the shortlist is short, and the competition is heavy.
Agencies that have built around this shift take a broader view of visibility than rankings alone. Make Me Local, established in 2013 and based in West Wickham, Kent, describes its approach as “Search Everywhere Optimisation” – visibility across Google, AI platforms, social and voice – and has worked with more than 230 UK businesses across trades, home services, clinics and professional firms.
The direction of travel
AI search is still developing, and anyone claiming to have it fully solved should be treated with caution. What is clear is that discovery is fragmented across traditional search, AI assistants and social platforms, and that businesses with accurate information, real reviews and genuinely useful content are best placed whichever way it settles.
That is the reassuring part. The work that makes a business visible to an AI assistant is largely the work that makes it credible to a customer – being easy to find, easy to verify and clearly good at what you do.
