What this guide is for
Your customers are increasingly asking an assistant instead of typing a search. The question is no longer only whether you rank. It is whether you get named when someone asks who to call.
This guide explains how that actually works, in the order the work has to happen. It is written from the six-layer audit we run on real businesses, and where something is uncertain or unmeasurable it says so rather than filling the gap with confidence.
What it will not do
It will not promise that any of this guarantees citations. These are third-party systems with ranking logic that changes without notice, and anyone telling you otherwise is describing a product rather than a reality.
It also will not pretend the tactics are the hard part. The hard part is that most businesses fail at layer one, eligibility, and never find out.
Read in order, or jump
Twelve chapters, in the order the work has to happen. The first four are the spine; the platform chapters at the end include two surfaces we deliberately do not score, and say why.
01 How AI search picks local businesses 02 Eligibility: can AI even see your site? 03 Robots.txt: block AI crawlers or allow them? 04 Measuring AI visibility honestly 05 Entity foundations for local businesses 06 Reviews as AI input 07 Citation surfaces: where AI engines look 08 Getting ChatGPT to recommend your business 09 Showing up in Perplexity 10 Showing up in Google AI Overviews 11 Showing up in Gemini 12 Copilot, and why we don't sample itFair questions
Is this the same as SEO?
It overlaps substantially and is not identical. Much of the foundation is shared: a crawlable, well-structured, factually consistent site helps in both. What differs is that an assistant assembles an answer from many sources rather than ranking pages, so surfaces you don't own matter more.
How long does this take to work?
Typically two to three quarters before AI numbers move meaningfully, because much of it depends on third-party sources updating on their own schedule.
Can I do this myself?
Most of it, yes, particularly the eligibility and entity work, which is the highest-return part and needs care rather than tooling. That's why the method is published.
Why publish the method if you sell the service?
Because the alternative is asking you to trust a number you cannot check, and in a category this full of unverifiable claims, showing the working is the only durable differentiator.
See where you actually stand
A free Visibility Check runs twelve real buying questions for your category across three surfaces, and shows you the raw responses.
Get my free Visibility Check