A tap in Enfield won’t stop running at 9pm. The stopcock is stuck, and the homeowner is sitting on the kitchen floor with a phone. A year ago they’d have typed “emergency plumber Enfield” into Google and rung whoever was top of the map. Now there’s a decent chance they open ChatGPT, or tap Google’s AI Mode, and ask: “Who’s a reliable emergency plumber near me that’s open now?”
They get three names and a short paragraph about each. Was one of them you? Be honest.
For most of the small businesses I look at, the honest answer is no. The AI doesn’t think they’re bad. It has never heard of them. This post is about why that happens and what you can do about it without buying anything.
It’s already happening
The number that made me sit up came from BrightLocal’s consumer survey back in February. Asked where they go for local business recommendations, 45% of people said ChatGPT or a similar AI tool. A year earlier it was 6%. Over the same period Google slipped from 83% to 71% as the place people read reviews. That’s a US survey, admittedly, but the UK figures point the same way. Ofcom says 54% of UK adults now use AI tools, and ChatGPT clocked up 252 million UK web visits in August 2025 alone, more than two and a half times the year before.
Then there’s Google itself. AI Overviews have been live in the UK since August 2024, AI Mode since July 2025, and Ofcom reports that around 30% of UK searches now return an AI summary at the top. Whether or not you ever open ChatGPT, your customers are getting AI answers.
How the AI picks a business
This is the bit that surprised me. These tools don’t have a secret opinion about your business. They build a shortlist from a small number of sources, then write a nice paragraph around it.
In September 2026, BrightLocal (again, US data) traced nearly two million sources quoted by ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews across 200,000 local searches. Two kinds of source dominated:
- Business websites made up 42% of everything the AI quoted.
- Google Business Profiles made up another 28.5%.
That’s over 70% from two places, both of which you control. Yelp came a distant third at under 10%. The rest was a long tail of directories and social sites.
The other finding from that study is the one that should worry you. When they checked whether a tracked business turned up in the answers, Google Maps mentioned it 66% of the time. The AI tools mentioned it only 32% to 38% of the time.
AI answers are also shorter. ChatGPT named an average of four businesses per answer, and Google’s AI Overviews named two and a half. There are fewer names in an AI answer, so they go to the businesses it can read clearly.
What “read clearly” means
An AI model can’t ring you to check. It can only use what’s written down. So the question is: if a machine read your website and your Google profile cold, could it answer these without guessing?
- What exactly do you do? (Not “property services”. “Boiler repairs, bathroom fitting and landlord gas safety checks”.)
- Where do you do it? (Named towns and areas, not “the South East”.)
- When are you available? (Real opening hours, emergency hours if you offer them.)
- What do you charge, roughly? (Even “callouts from £85” helps.)
- Are you any good? (Recent reviews, with specifics.)
- How does someone contact you right now? (Phone, WhatsApp, a form that works.)
Most small business sites I look at can’t answer half of these. They say “quality service at competitive prices” where the AI needs “emergency plumber, Enfield and Barnet, 7 days, callouts from £85”.
What to do this afternoon
1. Make your Google Business Profile boringly complete
Every field. Not most of them, every one. Primary category, extra categories, services with real names, opening hours (including the bank holiday ones), a description written the way you’d explain it in the pub, your website link, and at least ten photos of jobs you’ve done. Google’s own help pages say complete, accurate profiles are more likely to show up in local results, and that profile is now one of the two main places the AI tools read from.
2. Give each service its own page, and answer the obvious questions on it
One stat I had to read twice. Semrush looked at what ChatGPT quotes, and almost 90% of the time the page it picked was sitting at position 21 or worse in Google. Page three or beyond. So you don’t need to be top of Google for the AI to use you. You need a page that answers the question properly. These tools quote pages like “Emergency plumber in Enfield” that say what you fix, when you come out and what it costs, with three recent reviews underneath.
Write short question-and-answer sections on those pages. “Do you come out at weekends?” “How quickly can you get to Palmers Green?” “Do you charge a callout fee?” These are the phrases people type into AI tools, so they’re the phrases the AI looks for.
3. Keep the facts identical everywhere
Same business name, same phone number, same way of writing the address, on your website, your Google profile, Facebook and any directory you’re still listed on. If the AI finds “J Smith Plumbing” in one place and “Smith’s Plumbing & Heating Ltd” in another, it may well decide you’re two half-known businesses rather than one it can vouch for.
4. Get recent reviews that mention the job
A review that says “great service” tells the AI nothing. A review that says “came out to Winchmore Hill at 9pm, fixed the burst pipe under the sink, charged what he quoted” tells it everything. You can’t write the review, but you can ask the question that prompts it: “Would you mind saying what we fixed and where you are?”
5. Check your work
Ask ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode the questions your customers would ask. “Best nursery near Ipswich with forest school sessions.” “Accountant in Harrogate for a sole trader on Making Tax Digital.” “Personal trainer in Sutton who does early morning sessions.” See who comes up, then look at their website and Google profile. You’ll usually see why they were picked. Do it again in a month.
What not to do
- Don’t stuff your pages with the phrase “best plumber” fifty times.
- Don’t buy a tool that promises to “rank you in ChatGPT”.
- Don’t rewrite your site in robotic question-and-answer blocks that no human would want to read.
The AI tools are trying to find businesses that real people would recommend. The more your site reads like a knowledgeable mate explaining what you do, the better it works for both the person and the machine.
And don’t panic about traffic. Pew Research found (in the US) that people click a normal result on only 8% of visits when an AI summary appears, versus 15% when it doesn’t. That stings for bloggers. It matters far less for a plumber, because the person on the kitchen floor isn’t reading. They’re ringing. What you want is to be one of the names in the answer, with your phone number right there.
Your competitors haven’t done this
Most of them still have a website that says “welcome to our website” and a Google profile last touched in 2021. The AI tools are reading from a short list of sources, and those sources are the two things you can fix this week.
If your website can’t be fixed, because it’s a ten-year-old template or you can’t log in to it any more, that’s the problem to solve first. Our local SEO service handles the Google profile side if you’d rather not, and the pages come with the website. But start with the checklist above. It costs nothing but an afternoon.
