How AI Search Decides Who Gets Cited (And What You Can Do About It)

Ask ChatGPT to recommend a plumber in your town and it will hand back two or three names, usually with reasons attached. Somebody's business just got recommended to a stranger with money in hand, and it cost that business nothing. So naturally a cottage industry has appeared overnight selling "AI optimization" as a mysterious new science with secret levers only they can pull.

Here is the position that gets me into arguments: there is no secret. AI assistants are not consulting a hidden ledger of AI-approved businesses. They lean on the same boring public record that local search has scored for years. Your reviews. Your Google Business Profile. Your website's plain answers to plain questions. What other sites say about you. If someone is charging you a premium for a proprietary trick that "gets you into ChatGPT," you are paying extra for local SEO fundamentals with a new label on the tin.

That is good news, not bad news. It means the work is knowable, checkable, and mostly free. Let's walk through what the machines are actually reading.

The terrain shifted. The inputs didn't.

First, the part that is genuinely new: people really are asking assistants for local recommendations now, at a pace that surprised me.

BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey has tracked how people evaluate local businesses for years. In the 2026 edition, 97% of consumers said they read reviews for local businesses, and Google remained the top place they do it at 71%. But the number that matters for this article is the AI one: ChatGPT and similar tools jumped from 6% to 45% as a source people use for local business recommendations, in a single year.

So the question "what would an AI say if someone asked about my trade in my town" is no longer a nerd hobby. It is a real channel where real homeowners are forming shortlists.

What has not changed is the raw material. An assistant answering "best HVAC company near me" cannot inspect your ductwork or ride along on a service call. It can only read what is publicly written down about you. Reviews, profiles, directories, your own site, local press, forum threads. The public record is the whole game. If the record is thin, you are invisible. If the record is rich and consistent, you are citable.

Google has told us how this works

You do not have to guess at this, because Google published guidance for site owners on its AI features. The documentation on AI Overviews and AI Mode is refreshingly blunt: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." To be eligible, a page must simply be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet.

The same page says you do not need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or special markup to appear in these features. Read that again the next time an agency pitches you an "AI visibility file" as a line item.

One detail in that documentation deserves attention, though. Google describes a "query fan-out" technique, where the AI breaks a question into multiple searches and surfaces a wider, more diverse set of links than a traditional results page would. In practice that means an assistant answering one homeowner question may pull from your service page, a review site, and a local directory all at once. Every one of those surfaces is a place you either look strong or look absent.

The three dials Google admits to

For local businesses specifically, Google spells out its ranking inputs in plain English. The Google Business Profile Help page on local ranking names three factors: relevance, distance, and prominence.

Relevance is how well your profile matches what someone searched for. Google's own advice is to provide complete and detailed business information, and it says directly that businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local results. Most profiles I audit fail here before anything else. Wrong primary category, no services listed, a description written in 2019.

Distance is how far you are from the searcher. You cannot move your shop, but you can make sure your service areas are actually set.

Prominence is how well known you are, and Google says it includes how many sites link to you and how many reviews you have. The same page states that more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking, and that replying to reviews shows you value customers.

And then there is my favorite sentence in all of Google's documentation: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google." The inputs are earned, not bought. For an owner-operated business competing against better-funded chains, that is the fairest fight you will find anywhere in marketing.

What published research found about citations

There is real research on how generative engines pick sources, and it points the same direction. A paper called GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, presented at KDD 2024, tested which content changes actually improved a source's visibility in AI-generated answers.

The top performers were not tricks. The methods the authors call Cite Sources, Quotation Addition, and Statistics Addition, meaning content that references its sources, quotes credible voices, and includes concrete numbers, achieved a relative improvement of 30 to 40 percent on their visibility metric. Meanwhile, keyword stuffing, the oldest trick in the SEO drawer, offered little to no improvement in generative responses.

Translate that out of academic language: assistants prefer to cite pages that sound like a knowledgeable person being specific, and they skip pages that sound like a robot repeating "water heater replacement Nashville" fourteen times. Write like you talk on the job site. Name real prices, real timelines, real failure modes. That is what gets lifted into answers.

What this looks like for a real company

Here is an illustration, not a study, but it matches what I see in audits every week.

Picture two HVAC companies in the same metro. Company A has 340 Google reviews with replies on most of them, a profile with every service listed under the right category, photos from actual job sites, and a website that answers questions like "what does a heat pump cost to install here" with actual numbers and the reasoning behind them.

Company B does better work, frankly. But it has 41 reviews, half its services missing from its profile, and a website that says "We are your trusted comfort specialists" eleven different ways without ever stating a price, a brand it installs, or a neighborhood it serves.

When an assistant fans that homeowner's question out across the public record, Company A shows up everywhere it looks. Company B barely exists on paper. The machine is not judging their craftsmanship. It is judging the evidence, and only one of them left any.

If you want a deeper explanation of how the major AI platforms differ in what they pull from, this Ahrefs course lesson is a solid, hype-free walkthrough.

What you can control this quarter

You cannot control the models. You can control the record they read. In rough order of impact for a local service business:

Fix the profile first. Complete every field on your Google Business Profile: primary category, secondary categories, services, service areas, hours, photos. This is the cheapest visibility work that exists, and our free profile audit will show you exactly what is missing.

Build review volume and answer everything. Reviews are the loudest third-party signal in the whole record, and Google says outright that they factor into ranking. Volume, recency, and replies all matter, which is why reputation management is not a vanity service. It is citation fuel.

Write pages that deserve to be quoted. One page per service, per question homeowners actually ask, answered plainly with numbers and specifics. The research above says citable beats keyword-dense. Act accordingly.

Be consistent everywhere else. Same name, address, and phone across directories. Enough of a footprint that when an assistant fans out its searches, it keeps bumping into you.

Check the answers yourself. Once a month, ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google the questions your customers ask: "who should I call for a furnace repair in my town," "best roofer near me," your top three services by name. Write down who gets named and why the assistant says it picked them. The reasons it gives are usually a direct readout of the public record, and they will tell you exactly which signal to work on next.

None of this is exotic. All of it compounds.

What not to pay for

Since we are here, a short list of things this research says you can skip.

Do not pay for special "AI files" or secret markup. Google's documentation says plainly that none are needed. Do not pay for keyword stuffing dressed up as "AI content," because the KDD research above found it does little to nothing in generative answers. And do not pay anyone who guarantees placement in an AI answer, because nobody controls those systems, including the people selling the guarantee.

The dollars those pitches want are the same dollars that could buy real review velocity and real content. Spend them there.

The next step

Every claim in this article traces back to something you can read yourself: Google's own documentation and published research, linked above. That is the standard I think you should hold anyone to before you hand them a marketing budget, ours included.

If you want to know where you stand today, start with your free Local Visibility Score. It takes about a minute and shows how your business looks in the record that both Google and the AI assistants are reading. And if you want a full teardown of your citation footprint across AI search, that is exactly what our GEO audit exists for.

The machines are already answering questions about your trade in your town. The only decision is whether the public record gives them a reason to say your name.