Get local businesses named by ChatGPT and Google's AI answers
Ask ChatGPT for the best boiler engineer in your town and it names two or three firms. Every other firm is invisible to that customer. Measure it with a fixed set of prompts across five assistants, find out why rivals get named, fix what's fixable and sell the monthly number as a retainer. The first screenshot you send an owner does the selling for you.
- An offer that sells itself: a £295 audit, a fix sprint and a £125-a-month tracking retainer, with the hours behind each price
- Outreach that opens with proof: screenshot email, follow-up, walk-in script, proposal and monthly report email
- Python 3.9 or newer, nothing else to install. New to the terminal? Terminal survival kit
- Free accounts (or logged-out use) of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, plus Google search
- Basic local SEO knowledge helps: Get found on Google covers the Google Business Profile side in depth
- Optional: Run AI on your PC if you want the script to query a local model too
How AI answers choose which businesses to name
Know where each assistant gets its answer, so every fix you sell has a reason behind it.
The question moved, the businesses didn't noticeA growing share of customers now type "who's a good electrician in Bath?" into ChatGPT or read Google's AI Overview instead of scrolling ten blue links. The answer names two or three firms. Most small businesses have never checked whether they're one of them, and nobody in their life knows how to check. That gap is the service.
Each assistant answers from live search, not from magicFor a local question, the assistant runs searches, reads what comes back and writes a summary. So it's built on the same raw material as normal search, with a few differences that matter:
- Google AI Overviews and AI Mode use Google's own index. Google states there are no extra requirements and no special schema needed: a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet (Google: AI features and your website ↗). Both may use query fan-out, running several related searches and pulling links from each, so a business with good pages on several sub-topics gets more chances.
- Gemini draws on Google Search and Maps data, so the Google Business Profile is the backbone for local questions.
- Copilot is built on Bing. Bing Webmaster Tools now has an AI Performance report that counts how often a site is cited in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries.
- ChatGPT search uses its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says sites that block it won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers (OpenAI crawlers ↗).
- Perplexity uses PerplexityBot to find and link sites (Perplexity crawlers ↗), and it shows its sources, which makes it the easiest assistant to learn from.
What makes a business get namedAcross all five, the same signals keep coming up: the business is one clear entity (same name, address and phone everywhere), it's listed on the sites the assistant reads for that trade, it has plenty of recent reviews that mention the service and the place, and its own pages answer the question in plain text. None of that is new SEO. The new part is measuring it the way a customer now asks, and that's what the owner pays for.
Careful- What it takes. About 4 hours per audit, most of it running prompts and reading answers carefully.
- Patience with noise: answers change between runs, so you sell a monthly trend, never a single result.
- A clear promise: nobody controls what an assistant says, so you sell the measurement and the work on the fix list, not a guaranteed mention.
- Steady prospecting: a few hours a week finding businesses and running their prompts before you contact them.
- Who this suits: you like detective work, you write clearly, and you can explain a technical cause to a plumber in one sentence. If you already sell local SEO, this is the add-on clients ask about next.
Everything is in one kitread the kit overview or download the whole kit: the tracker script, a sample client file and answers, the fix checklist, a schema template, the pricing calculator and the outreach scripts.