What AI assistants read about your local business
When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI answers for a good place to eat or a repair shop nearby, the answer comes from what those tools can find and read about local businesses. Your website is one of the main sources you control.
Where the answers come from
These tools search the web and read the pages they find, including business websites, review sites and map listings. Google’s AI answers also draw on Google’s own business data, which is your Google Business Profile. The tools tend to quote details that are written clearly and that agree across several sources.
What makes a website easy to read
- Text, not pictures of text. A menu saved as a photo or a PDF is hard for these tools to read. A menu typed on the page is easy.
- Structured data. A short block of code, called schema markup, labels your hours, address, phone, price range and type of business so software doesn’t have to guess.
- The same details everywhere. Your name, address and phone written the same way on your site, your Google listing and Yelp.
- Plain words people search with. “South Indian restaurant in Langley Park” says more than “a culinary experience”.
- A fast page. Pages that load slowly or need a lot of scripts to show their text can be skipped.
What you can’t control
No one decides what an AI assistant recommends except the company that runs it, and the answers change. What you can do is make sure that when it looks you up, it finds the right hours, the right address and a clear description of what you sell.