Be the business AI recommends
The free checklist for local businesses that want ChatGPT and Gemini to name them when a customer asks who is best near them. Eight checks, no sign-up.
Your customers stopped Googling. They ask ChatGPT or Gemini “who is the best plumber near me?” and get one name back, maybe three. These eight checks decide whether that name is yours. Free, nothing to sign up for — the whole checklist is on this page.
The checklist
- 01
Claim your Google Business Profile and fill every field.
Gemini answers local questions from Google Maps. Category, hours, service area, services with prices, photos: an empty field is a question it cannot answer about you.
- 02
Claim Bing Places and Apple Business Connect too.
ChatGPT’s web search draws on Bing, and Apple Maps feeds Siri. Most of your competitors never set these up.
- 03
Use the same name, address and phone everywhere.
Your site, your profiles, Yelp, the directories in your trade. When they disagree, an engine trusts none of them.
- 04
Write one page per question your customers actually ask.
“Emergency plumber in Laval, open Sundays” deserves its own page that answers it in the first two lines: who you are, where you work, when you are open, what it costs. AI quotes the page that answers the exact question.
- 05
Name your city and neighbourhoods in plain words.
Not only in the footer — in the page that answers. “We cover Laval, the North Shore and Montreal” is a sentence an engine can repeat.
- 06
Ask for reviews that say what you did and where.
“Fixed our burst pipe in Laval on a Sunday” beats five stars and “great service”. Engines read the words, not just the score.
- 07
Mark up your site so a machine can read it.
LocalBusiness schema: name, address, phone, hours, area served, price range. Your web person can add it in an hour, and it is the one form an engine reads without guessing.
- 08
Ask the engines yourself, once a month.
Open ChatGPT and Gemini, ask the question your customers ask, and write down who gets named. That list is your scoreboard.
None of this guarantees a mention — nothing does. It removes the reasons an engine has to skip you.
Want it checked for you?
Send me your business, your city and the one question your customers ask. I ask six engines, note who they name, and send back one page with the first thing I would fix. Free, done by hand, usually within a week — the same free scan any business gets, pointed at your street.