Do AI assistants recommend local businesses?
Short answer: Yes. Ask for a plumber or dentist in a UK town and ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity return a short named list drawn from your site, GBP, directories and reviews.
Yes, and increasingly by name. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for "a reliable electrician in Swindon" and you get three to five named businesses with a sentence on each, often with a phone number or link. Google AI Overviews do the same above the classic results for many local queries.
Where those names come from differs by engine, which is why a business can be recommended constantly by one and never by another:
- Gemini and AI Overviews draw heavily on Google Business Profile, Maps data and reviews.
- ChatGPT with search reads the top web results and well-known directories, and favours businesses whose own pages state clearly what they do and where.
- Perplexity cites specific pages and leans on review platforms, trade bodies and local press.
- Claude and Copilot behave similarly to ChatGPT, with Copilot using Bing's index.
What makes a local business recommendable, across all of them:
- Exact consistency of name, address and phone everywhere (NAP).
- A specific category and a filled-in Google Business Profile with recent reviews.
- A website that AI crawlers can fetch, with
LocalBusinessschema and one page per service and per area. - Service pages whose first paragraph answers the customer's question with the business named and the town stated.
- Presence on the directories and review sites the assistants already cite for your trade.
A useful first step is to find out what the assistants say today. The free check at /free-check runs five typical prompts for your sector and town on two engines and shows you who is recommended and which sources were used. Most local businesses find the result is not what they expected, in one direction or the other.