01How assistants pick local businesses
An AI assistant has no first page. Ask it for a landscaper or a barber and it names somewhere between three and fifteen businesses, cites a handful of pages, and the list changes next time. The answers are built largely from directories and profiles — Google Business Profile, Yelp, Apple Maps, industry listings — with your own site as the source of facts. A website is necessary and nowhere near sufficient.
02What gets measured
A fixed panel of ten real customer questions, run against each assistant, dated and repeated: how many answers name you, in what position, and whether they cite your site. One answer proves nothing; a rate over time does. Two clients started at zero of eight customer questions in October 2026 — that's the honest starting line, and the number the work is judged against.
03What moves it
A readiness check first: are the AI crawlers allowed in, do they get the same page people do, is the content readable without JavaScript, does the business schema carry a recognised type with name, address, hours and links to real profiles. Then the listings themselves, consistent facts everywhere, pages that answer the questions people actually ask, and a repeat of the panel to show the change.
04What nobody can sell you
A guaranteed place in an assistant's organic answer. Anyone offering "guaranteed #1 in ChatGPT" is selling something that does not exist. What I can do is move every input the assistants read, and show you the rate moving with it.
