Here is a question nobody asked me a year ago and somebody asks me most weeks now. A customer types "plumber in Bay Shore" into ChatGPT instead of Google. Does my business come up? The short answer is that it might, nobody can promise it either way, and you can find out for yourself in about ten minutes.
Start with what is actually changing. Google is not going anywhere, and most of your customers still start there. But a slice of them now open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask the way they would ask a neighbor. Who does emergency roof repair on the South Shore. Best pediatric dentist near me that takes my insurance. The tool answers in a paragraph, names two or three businesses, and for that customer the whole shopping trip is over.
I do not know how big that slice is. Neither does anyone else, at least not in a way I would repeat to you at the counter. There is no trustworthy count of how many Long Island customers picked their plumber out of an AI answer this month, and the confident-sounding percentages going around mostly trace back to somebody selling AI search services. So here is what I can back up, and I will stop where the evidence stops.
What those answers actually read
These tools are not looking at your website the way a customer does. They do not see your photos, your color scheme, or how nice the header looks on a phone. They read text: some of it absorbed during training, and increasingly from a live web search that runs the second the question is asked. Then they assemble an answer out of pages they can fetch, parse, and quote.
So which pages win that? Nobody outside those companies can hand you the formula, and it changes anyway. But there is real measurement on which pages get cited. Ahrefs studied 17 million AI citations in July 2025 and found the cited content ran about 26 percent newer than ordinary search results, with roughly half of it published or updated within the previous thirteen weeks. And in a controlled test published at KDD in 2024, Aggarwal and colleagues found that writing quotable, self-contained answers backed by real sources made a page about 40 percent more visible in AI answers, while keyword stuffing did nothing at all.
Boil that down and you get three words. Fresh: something on your site changed recently. Clear: the answer to a customer's actual question is written out in sentences, on your page, in words a machine can lift whole. Consistent: your name, address, hours, and services say the same thing in every place a machine can check them.
What I cannot tell you is the weighting. Whether fresh beats clear, how often the index refreshes, how much any one signal is worth. That part is not public, and anyone who quotes you a percentage on it is guessing out loud.
Why a set-and-forget site is invisible
I look at a lot of local sites. The same handful of patterns come up over and over, and none of them are the owner's fault. They are simply what a website turns into when it ships and then nobody's job is to keep it alive.
Nothing has changed in a year or more. The site looks fine. It is also frozen. Against research showing that cited pages skew recent, a frozen site is a page with no reason to be picked over the shop down the road that posted something in March.
The important details are not really on the page. Hours, service list, phone number, all pulled in by a third-party script: a booking widget, a hosted reviews badge, a directory embed. A person sees them fine. Something reading the page often gets an empty box where your hours should be.
There is no structured data at all. Schema is a small block of code that labels the page for machines: this is a business, this is the address, these are the hours, this is the price. Plenty of small business sites carry none. It is not a disqualification. It just means a machine has to guess, and a guess is a thing it can get wrong.
Key sections were never filled in. The builder template shipped with placeholders for the team page, the service areas, the story. Two years later the starter text is still sitting there. Every one of those is a question a customer asks, left blank on the page where the answer belongs.
The promotions have no dates. "Spring special." "Now booking." "New patients welcome." Written once, never touched. A person shrugs and moves on. Something reading the page for how current you are has nothing to date it by.
Stack those up and you get a site that is perfectly pleasant to look at and close to invisible to anything reading it. The consolation is that this is not a race you are losing badly. BrightLocal's small business report puts the share of small businesses keeping their Google profile current at about 35 percent. Most of your competition has not gotten to this either.
A 10-minute check you can run today
No tools, no spend, no login you do not already have. Run these five in order.
- Ask the question yourself. Open ChatGPT or Gemini and type what a customer would type. Your trade plus your town first, then the problem instead of the trade ("my water heater is leaking, who do I call in Sayville"). Ask it two or three ways. Answers vary by person and by day, so you are looking for a pattern, not a verdict.
- Read your own page source. On a desktop, right click your homepage and choose View Page Source. Press Command F or Control F and search for "schema," then "LocalBusiness." If neither turns up, you have no structured data. Then search for your own phone number. If it is not in there, a script is painting it in after the page loads, and a machine may never see it.
- Find the newest thing on your site. A post, a changed price, a new photo, anything carrying a date. If the freshest item is last winter's holiday hours, you have your freshness answer.
- Line up your details. Put your website and your Google Business Profile side by side. Business name, street address, phone, hours. Not close. Identical, down to whether it says Suite or Ste. This is the cheapest thing on the list to fix and one of the most common reasons a machine hedges on you.
- Click the links in your own bios. Facebook, Instagram, your Google profile, anywhere you list a website. Old domain, dead link chain, a link tool you stopped paying for. Those links are part of how anything reading about you confirms you are the same business it just read about somewhere else.
If four of the five come back clean, you are in better shape than most of the sites I open.
What fixing it involves
None of the fixes are clever, which is either good news or bad news depending on your week. Write the details out in real text on the page instead of leaving them to a widget. Add the structured data. Answer the ten questions customers actually call and ask, in writing, on your own site. Match your name, hours, and services everywhere they appear. Then keep something changing, because freshness is not a signal you can bank once and walk away from.
That last part is the catch, and it is the same catch as the one in the note on what a website costs. It is not a project you finish. Doing it yourself is entirely realistic if you have an hour a week and you will actually take it. If you will not, that is the standing work our Stay Found plan does: two fresh, sourced pages a month, your question-and-answer blocks kept current, your details matched everywhere, and a quarterly sweep with a receipt of what got published. It runs $299 a month as an add-on to a website care plan, on a six-month minimum, then month to month.
And so we are square about the ceiling: I will not promise you a spot in any AI answer, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody controls what these tools say from week to week. What you can control is whether they can read you at all. Most local sites currently cannot clear that bar, which makes this a rare thing in marketing. A fixable problem, with the door still open.
Quick answers
Can ChatGPT recommend my business?
It can, and it recommends local businesses every day. Whether it names yours depends on whether it can read you: pages that changed recently, answers written out in real text on your own site, and details that match everywhere it can check. Nobody controls what these tools say, so treat anyone promising you a spot in an AI answer the way you would treat anyone promising you the top of Google.
How do I check whether AI tools can see my website?
Right click your homepage, choose View Page Source, and search that text for the word "schema," then "LocalBusiness," then your own phone number. If your phone number is not in the source, a script is painting it in after the fact and a machine reading the page may never see it. Then ask ChatGPT or Gemini for your trade in your town a few different ways and see who comes up.
Does my website need schema markup?
Schema is a small block of code that labels your page for machines: this is a business, this is the address, these are the hours, this is the price. It is not required, and its absence does not disqualify you. It removes guesswork, and a guess is a thing a machine can get wrong. Most small business sites have none at all, so it is one of the cheaper gaps to close.
How much of my business now comes from AI search?
I do not know, and I have not seen a number I would repeat to you. There is no trustworthy count of how many local customers picked a plumber or a dentist out of an AI answer this month, and the confident percentages going around usually trace back to somebody selling AI search services. What is measurable is which pages get cited when these tools do answer, and that research is worth acting on.