Imagine a customer opens ChatGPT and types: “Who can fix a leaking tap near me on a Saturday?” The tool answers with a few local names. Whether your business is one of them can depend less on tricks and more on something simple: does your website say, in plain words, that you do Saturday call-outs, which areas you cover, and how to reach you?
Some customers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini for local recommendations. You do not need an agency to respond to that, and you probably do not need to rebuild everything. You need to make one decision: how much work does your website actually need? This guide helps you make it.
What are your options?
There are five realistic choices. They are listed starting with the smallest amount of work.
- Option A, keep going: your site is already clear and accurate. You keep it up to date and change nothing else.
- Option B, clean up your facts: you make your business name, address, phone number and opening hours identical everywhere they appear online.
- Option C, add plain answers: you add a page for each main service and short written answers to the questions customers really ask.
- Option D, repair the foundations: your site is hard for people or automated tools to read, so it needs serious repair or a rebuild.
- Option E, hire a specialist: you pay someone who sells “AI search optimization”, either as a one-off project or as a recurring fee.
How can you check whether your business shows up in ChatGPT?
Before you choose, look at what these tools say about you today. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini the questions a customer would ask, in the words a customer would use: the service, the area, and a detail such as weekend opening. Then ask each tool about your business by name.
- Write down what is wrong, not only whether you appear. Wrong hours or an old phone number are a different problem from not being mentioned at all.
- Ask more than once. Answers can change between attempts and between tools, so one answer is a sample, not a verdict.
- Note where the information came from, if the tool shows its sources. That tells you which page or listing to fix.
What does the Quotability Check look at?
These tools can draw on your website, your business listings, reviews and other pages that mention you. You cannot control all of that, but you can control your own site. The Quotability Check is six questions about it. Answer each one with a yes or a no.
- One page per main service. Does each service you want to be found for have its own page, with the service named in the heading? A single page that lists everything in one sentence gives a tool very little to quote.
- Identical business facts. Are your name, address, phone number and hours exactly the same on your website, your Google Business Profile, your social pages and any directories? If two sources disagree, a tool may repeat the wrong one.
- Written answers to real questions. Does your site answer, in full sentences, the questions customers ask you on the phone: which areas you cover, whether they need to book, what a first visit involves?
- Text, not pictures of text. Are your menu, price list, hours and list of services written as text on the page, rather than inside a photo, a scanned PDF or a banner graphic? Automated readers can miss words that exist only inside an image.
- Readable without obstacles. Can someone read your key pages without logging in or closing several pop-ups? Is the important text part of the page itself, rather than appearing only after heavy scripts run? Also ask whoever runs your site whether any setting blocks automated crawlers. Sites sometimes block them by accident.
- Area stated in words. Does your site name the towns or districts you serve in plain text, rather than relying on a map alone?
The six questions tell you what to look at. They do not predict who gets recommended: these tools make their own choices, and no one outside them can promise a result.
Which option should you choose?
Start with the first line below that describes you. When that work is done, run the check again and see which line fits now.
- If the tools describe you correctly and you answered yes to all six questions: choose Option A. Keep your facts current, and add a page whenever you add a service.
- If the tools repeat wrong hours, an old address or an old phone number, or question 2 was a no: choose Option B first. While your facts disagree, the tools may keep quoting the wrong version, whatever else you improve.
- If the tools mention you only vaguely or only for one of several services, or questions 1, 3 or 6 were a no: choose Option C. This is writing work, not technical work.
- If questions 4 or 5 were a no and you cannot change the site yourself: choose Option D. Good writing cannot help if the text cannot be read.
- If you run several locations, or no one on your side can do B, C or D: consider Option E. Ask any specialist exactly which pages and listings they will change. A useful answer will describe the same kinds of changes as Options B and C. If it describes something you cannot see or check, ask more questions before you pay.
Say you run a dog grooming salon. You ask Perplexity about dog grooming in your town, and it lists you, but with last year’s hours and without your nail trim service. Question 2 is a no, because your old hours are still on a directory listing. Questions 1 and 4 are also a no, because nail trims appear only on a photo of your price board. The first matching line is Option B, so you correct your hours everywhere. Then you run the check again, and Option C fits: you add a short page about nail trims and type your price list as text. You can edit your own site, so you do not need Option D or E.
What is the Stale Fact Tradeoff?
Being easy to quote has a cost that is easy to miss. Call it the Stale Fact Tradeoff: the more specific facts you publish, the more useful you are to customers and to these tools, and the more places you have to update when something changes.
Say you write “open Saturdays until 2pm” on your website, your business profile and three directories, and then you change your hours. Every one of those copies is now wrong until you correct it, and a tool may repeat whichever version it finds. The answer is not to publish fewer facts. Keep a short written list of every place your business facts appear, and whenever you change something, update all of them together.
A clear site for customers is also a clear site for AI tools
Nothing in this guide is a special trick for AI. Service pages, consistent facts, written answers and pages that load as readable text are exactly what a customer at a bus stop, looking at a phone, also needs. That is why they are a safer place to put your effort than whatever is new this month: if these tools change how they choose what to recommend, a clear and accurate website can still serve the people who visit it.
So run the Quotability Check, find your line in the guide, and do that one thing. Then ask the tools again, keeping in mind that their answers can vary from one attempt to the next.
To see how your own site measures up, run the free website check: it gives your site a 0 to 100 score plus the three things costing you customers. For the local side, the Local Visibility Scorecard ranks what to fix first.