Nobody controls which businesses ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews recommend, and anyone who promises you a place in those answers is guessing. What you can control is how easy your firm is to find, how consistently it is described, and whether other sites vouch for it. For a trade or service business that works in one town and the villages around it, that comes down to a handful of jobs, most of which you can start this week.

This is written for the owner of a firm like that: an electrician, a heating engineer, a builder, an accountant, a physio. It is not a trick. It is the groundwork that wins you the map listing on Google, plus a few checks aimed at the AI tools. If you want the background on the terms, our GEO vs AEO guide explains them.

Check where you stand today

Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, ideally on your phone, the way a customer would. Ask the questions a customer would type, with your trade and your town in them:

  • “best electrician near Ampthill”
  • “who can fix a boiler in Woburn this week”
  • “reliable builder for a house extension near Bedford who gives fixed quotes”

Use your own trade and your own towns, and try two or three wordings of each. For every answer, write down the date, the tool, the question, which businesses are named, what the answer says about each, and which websites it cites. A spreadsheet is plenty.

Look for three things. Are you named at all? If a rival is named, what does the answer say that makes them sound trustworthy: reviews, years trading, a specific service? And which sites keep appearing as sources: a directory, a trade body, a local news site? Those are your targets later in this guide.

Expect the answers to vary. Ask the same question twice or on a different day and you may get a different list, and where the asker is standing can change it too. Treat the result as a rough picture, not a league table.

Here is a worked example. It is hypothetical, not something we measured. Say you run a heating firm near Ampthill. You ask “best boiler repair near Ampthill” in all three tools. Two name competitors and cite the same directory, and the third names nobody and cites a local newspaper’s “best tradespeople” feature. Your to-do list writes itself: get your listing in that directory right, find out how the paper chooses who it features, and make sure your own site says plainly that you cover Ampthill.

Complete your Google Business Profile

Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence, and that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. It also says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up. So fill in everything that applies: address or service area, opening hours including special hours, the right business category, photos, and replies to reviews.

Google’s own guidance for AI Overviews and AI Mode says there are no additional requirements or special optimisations beyond being indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet. The sensible reading is that ordinary local search groundwork is also your AI groundwork. That is our inference from Google’s wording, not something Google states about local results.

We walk through the setup step by step in how to show up on Google Maps for your trade and town.

Make your name, address and phone number the same everywhere

Pick one version of your business name, address and phone number, and use it exactly. Check these places:

  1. Your website footer and contact page.
  2. Your Google Business Profile.
  3. Facebook, LinkedIn and any other social page.
  4. Your trade body’s “find a member” listing.
  5. Directories and local listings you have signed up to over the years.
  6. Invoices, vans and email signatures, because customers copy details from them.

We have not seen a published rule saying AI tools require this. It is a cheap way to stop your firm looking like two different businesses with the same name, and it is the groundwork that local search has always rewarded.

Reviews: ask for them, answer them, never buy them

Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking, and its page on reviews says you can ask customers for them by sharing a link or QR code. The same page says offering free or discounted goods or services in return for reviews is strictly prohibited, so do not do it.

What works in practice is dull and reliable. Ask at the point of a happy handover, by text, with the link ready. Reply to every review in a sentence or two, in plain words, naming the job where it is natural to do so. Answer the unhappy ones calmly and factually, without sharing anything private. Reviews that mention the actual work and the area give anyone reading them, human or machine, something concrete to go on.

Put plain answers on your website

Your site should answer the questions customers ask on the phone, in the words they use. One page per main service is a good start. Each page should say, near the top:

  • what the service is and who it is for;
  • which towns and villages you cover;
  • how quickly you can usually start, and how you quote;
  • what you do not do, so the right customers ring you.

Write it the way you would explain it to a neighbour. Lead each section with the answer, then the detail. That format helps people skimming on a phone, and it gives an AI tool a clear passage to quote. If you want the longer version, see our GEO vs AEO guide or our GEO service.

One technical check is worth ten minutes. OpenAI says sites that opt out of its OAI-SearchBot crawler will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as plain links. If anyone has ever tightened your robots.txt file, ask whoever built your site to confirm it is not blocking OAI-SearchBot or Googlebot. If a rebuild is on the cards, our guide to rebuilding a website without losing rankings covers what to protect. Our free website scan also scores your site on quality and AI-readiness.

Add LocalBusiness structured data

Structured data is a small block of code that tells search engines the facts about your business in a standard format. Google’s guidance for LocalBusiness structured data uses JSON-LD, says to use the most specific business type possible, and lists name and address as required, with telephone, website address and opening hours recommended. A minimal example for an electrician looks like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Electrician",
  "name": "Example Electrical Ltd",
  "url": "https://www.example.co.uk",
  "telephone": "+44 1234 567890",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "1 High Street",
    "addressLocality": "Ampthill",
    "postalCode": "MK00 0XX",
    "addressCountry": "GB"
  }
}
</script>

Keep it identical to what is visible on the page and to your Business Profile. Google is clear that it does not guarantee any feature that uses structured data will appear, and that there is no special schema you need for AI Overviews. Treat it as housekeeping that helps Google read your details correctly, not as a way into AI answers. It is usually a short job for whoever built your site.

Get mentioned on sites people already trust

Google describes prominence as how well known a business is, and says it is based on things like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. For a local firm, the realistic sources of those mentions are:

  • your trade body or accreditation scheme’s member directory;
  • the local chamber of commerce or business network;
  • local press, town newsletters and community sites, for work you have done or sponsored;
  • suppliers and manufacturers that list approved installers or stockists;
  • clubs and charities you sponsor, which usually thank sponsors on their site.

Go back to your spreadsheet from the first step. If the same directory or trade body keeps appearing in the answers, getting your listing there complete and accurate is probably worth more than another blog post. Be honest in everything you submit: a mention that overstates what you do is worse than none.

We could not find a current, complete statement from OpenAI on which sources sit behind ChatGPT’s local answers, so we would not build a plan around one directory. That is also why this guide leaves out Bing Places and other single-platform tricks: we could not verify that any one of them feeds ChatGPT, and we would rather leave it out than guess.

What to expect, and a monthly routine

No one controls these answers and they shift. A tool may name you this month and not next month, for reasons no outsider can see. Anyone who guarantees a result is selling something they cannot deliver.

What you can do is make the routine boring and regular. Once a month, re-run the same questions in the same three tools, add a row to the spreadsheet, and note what changed since last time. Once a quarter, check your profile, your listings and your reviews for anything out of date. Fix the gaps the answers point to, in the order they matter: profile, details, reviews, site, mentions. When the calls do start to arrive, our guide to answering every enquiry the same day covers keeping up with them.

If your firm is within reach of Woburn and you would like a hand with any of this, our local rate takes 20% off the first piece of work, and every piece of work is agreed in writing first. Or just book a 30 minute call and we will look at what the AI tools say about you together.