How AI Assistants Pick Which Local Business to Recommend

Start with what Google has actually published

Google updated its guide to generative AI features on 10 July 2026, and the most useful sentence is a negative one. "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add."

That line contradicts most of what gets sold as AI SEO. We sell monthly SEO. We'd earn more if the honest answer were a shiny new product line. It isn't.

The eligibility rule is blunt. To appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. That's the whole gate. No separate AI index, nothing to opt into.

The same guide names the tactics that do nothing: llms.txt and other AI text files, chunking content into tiny pieces, rewriting pages for AI, and hunting for inauthentic mentions. Its one local line points at Google Business Profile.

The schema question, answered against our own interest

LocalBusiness schema is the standard agency pitch for AI visibility, and the best evidence says it doesn't do that job. Ahrefs published the only serious causal test on 11 May 2026. Their correlational pass found what gets quoted at you: cited pages carry JSON-LD far more often.

Then the harder version. They took 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD between August 2025 and March 2026, matched them against 4,000 controls, and measured 30 days either side. AI Mode plus 2.4%. ChatGPT plus 2.2%. Noise. AI Overviews down 4.6%, and that one was statistically significant. Tested directly, the assistants took visible text off the page and ignored the hidden markup.

One caveat. Those pages were already indexed and already cited, so this isn't proof schema is useless on a page nobody has seen. Keep it for rich results. Don't pay monthly for it under an AI heading.

Your Google Business Profile is doing the heavy lifting

Profound tracked over 32 million google.com citation instances inside Google's AI Mode between 15 April and 30 June 2026. google.com became the second most-cited domain in Google's own AI product, up 8.4 times, almost entirely from Business Profiles and Product Knowledge Panels.

So the profile you haven't touched since somebody set it up is a main ingredient in Google's AI answers. Primary category set properly. Real service areas. Hours that match your voicemail. Services list filled in. Photos of your own vans, not stock boilers.

Two things owners get wrong. First, the name field. Google's guidelines say it holds your real-world business name, the one on the van and the invoices, and padding it out risks suspension. "Dave's Plumbing | Emergency Plumber Leeds 24/7" is a risk dressed as a tactic.

Second, the address. If you work out of the house and drive to customers, which is most trades, Google wants it hidden and a service area set instead. One profile, not one per town.

Where the citations actually come from

Whitespark ran 540 queries across Houston, Phoenix and Denver in May 2025. For the Houston plumber searches, the AI Overviews cited 23 sources between them. Sixty per cent went to third-party publishers, the Reddit and Yelp sort. Only 40% to local businesses. Small, American, over a year old.

The British version arrived on 20 April 2026, when Checkatrade launched an app inside ChatGPT. UK only. You describe the job and get a shortlist of vetted trades, or for simple work a fixed price and a booking there and then. Its 50,000-plus members pass up to 12 checks and must keep reviews strong.

Then on 23 July 2026 OpenAI licensed Yelp's 330 million reviews into ChatGPT. Yelp barely registers here, so that won't change how often your phone rings. The pattern is the point. Directories are becoming the supply chain for AI local answers, and ours already has a foot in the door. Weigh [the fee Checkatrade quotes you] against [your average job value].

The other underused asset is a credential a machine can check. Gas Safe registration is a legal requirement for gas work, and every registered business has a number anyone can look up. Put it in the same format on your site, your Business Profile and every listing. Facts a machine can reconcile and a wary customer acts on.

Honestly, the crawler stuff trips people up more than any of this

OAI-SearchBot is the crawler behind ChatGPT's search features. OpenAI's documentation says sites opted out of it won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. GPTBot handles training. Perplexity runs PerplexityBot.

Two failure modes we keep meeting. A developer blocked the AI bots eighteen months ago and nobody remembers. Or robots.txt is fine, but the hosting, CDN or firewall quietly refuses OpenAI's published IP ranges before the request reaches the site. OpenAI publishes those ranges as JSON files so this can be checked. Invisible from outside, which is why it survives.

Check nobody has left a nosnippet rule lying around either. Google says it stops the page being used as direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and kills your snippets in web search, Images and Discover too.

What it's worth right now

Small, growing fast off a small base. Sterling Sky's June 2026 report has one client whose AI referral traffic went from 0.1% of their Google traffic to 2% in a year. Twentyfold growth. Still 2%.

AI local packs showed on about 7% of the keywords Sterling Sky tracks. Those packs featured 5,943 unique businesses where ordinary three-packs featured 18,330, so roughly a third as many firms get named. And no call buttons.

Someone will quote you the 68% figure, local searches triggering an AI Overview. Same Whitespark study, and the average hides the split that matters. Informational queries, 92%. Plain local-intent searches, the "emergency plumber Sheffield" sort, 15%.

Ranking first doesn't earn a citation any more. Ahrefs put top-10 pages at 38% of AI Overview citations in early 2026, down from about 76% in mid-2025. BrightEdge's method puts it nearer 17%. Nobody agrees on the number.

Ofcom reported on 2 April 2026 that 54% of UK adults use tools like ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, up from 31% in 2024. It doesn't ask how many use them to find a plumber, so any British figure for that is guesswork. BrightLocal's 2026 US survey found 74% only care about reviews from the last three months.

One genuine bit of luck for British owners. Google began rolling out Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console on 3 June 2026, starting in the UK. Impressions, pages, countries and devices, no clicks. Go and see if yours has appeared.

Things to stop paying for

• llms.txt. Google's guide lists AI text files among the things you don't need. Search ignores them.
• Keyword-stuffed Business Profile names. Policy breach, suspension risk, no evidence it helps.
• US-only products. Google's Ask Maps launched in the States and India in March 2026. Not here.

Nobody outside these companies knows how an assistant picks which plumber to name. Google's guidance amounts to normal SEO plus an accurate Business Profile. OpenAI, Gemini and Perplexity have disclosed close to nothing. The one rigorous experiment came back null. Everything past that is inference, ours included.

Fix the profile. Get on directories that actually operate in Britain. Keep reviews recent. Don't block the crawlers. If you'd rather someone found which of those is broken on your site, that's the sort of thing we do.

Do I need schema markup to appear in AI Overviews?

No. Google's guide says structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and Ahrefs' May 2026 study found adding JSON-LD produced a small drop in AI Overview citations and nothing measurable elsewhere. Keep schema for rich results, not as an AI plan.

How do I check that ChatGPT can even see my website?

Look in robots.txt for any rule disallowing OAI-SearchBot, the crawler behind ChatGPT search. Then get whoever runs your hosting or CDN to confirm OpenAI's published IP ranges aren't blocked at firewall level. That one is invisible from outside, and it's what we find most.

Is Checkatrade worth joining purely to get into ChatGPT?

Only if it stacks up as a lead source on its own merits. The ChatGPT app is UK only and the most concrete AI route into a trade, but you pay the membership either way. Do the maths on jobs won.