How AI assistants choose which businesses to recommend.

Businesses with solid Google reputations are discovering that when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for a local recommendation, they do not appear. A competitor does. Often one with fewer reviews and a less polished website.

The reason is that AI recommendations do not follow the same logic as Google search rankings. What determines whether you are mentioned is different from what determines where you rank on a results page. Most business owners do not yet know what those differences are.

When someone asks an AI assistant for a local recommendation, the tool draws on two types of information.

The first is its training data. Large language models are trained on a substantial portion of the public internet. If your business has been described clearly on your website, mentioned in local directories, referenced in a food guide or community publication, that information may be part of what the model already knows.

The second is live search data. Tools like Perplexity, Google's AI Overview, and increasingly ChatGPT can access current search results. They can read your Google Business Profile, your website, and recent mentions, right now, at the moment of the search.

The combination means historical information and current information both matter. What they have in common is that they reward the same underlying thing: a clear, consistent, and specific description of your business.

Based on working with businesses across East London on exactly this, here is what separates those that appear in AI recommendations from those that do not.

A specific Google Business Profile description. Not a tagline. A description that answers the fundamental questions a stranger would have: what type of business, where exactly, what does it offer, who is it for. An AI assistant building a recommendation for a human question needs information it can use. Vague descriptions do not make the cut.

A website that describes the business in plain language. AI assistants read your website. They pay particular attention to pages that explain what a business does, where it operates, and who it serves. A properly written About or Services page, with your location and offer described specifically, is one of the most direct signals you can give to an AI building a local recommendation.

Consistency across platforms. When your Google Business Profile, your website, and your directory listings all describe your business differently, an AI cannot construct a confident answer. It tends not to recommend businesses it cannot describe reliably. Inconsistency, which often builds up silently over years, works directly against AI visibility.

An AI assistant cannot recommend what it cannot describe. Everything follows from that.

There is one technical element worth understanding, even if you do not plan to deal with it yourself.

Structured data (a standard called Schema.org) is code that can be added to your website to give machines a labelled version of your content. Instead of an AI having to infer what your business is from the text on your pages, structured data says explicitly: this is the name of the business, this is the address, this is the type of business, these are the opening hours.

Without structured data, an AI reads your site and does its best to work out what you are. With it, you have told the machine directly. For local businesses, LocalBusiness schema is the relevant type. Adding it to your website is one of the most direct things you can do to improve how clearly AI assistants understand and describe you.

Older websites almost never have this. It is something we add as standard to every site we build or work on.

Open ChatGPT or Perplexity. Type your business name. Then type what a potential customer would type to find a business like yours in your area. Read what comes back. If you do not appear, or if what appears is thin or inaccurate, that is your starting point.

Read your Google Business Profile description as a stranger would. Does it answer what, where, and who for? If it reads like a tagline rather than a description, it will not give an AI enough to work with.

Check that your key information is consistent across your website, Google, and Apple Maps. Same name, same address, same phone number, same description of what you do. Inconsistency is invisible from the inside and costly from the outside.