Why an assistant does not mention your business.

The single biggest input for anything with a place in the question. It is where your hours, category, address and reviews are held, and assistants lean on it heavily.

What to do: Claim it if you have not. Then fix the category, the hours including holidays, and add photographs taken this year.

Not the star rating so much as the words. An assistant asked for the best breakfast reads what people wrote, and the dish they named is the dish it repeats.

What to do: Ask every happy customer, in person, at the moment they are happy. Never buy them and never write them yourself. A model reading a wall of identical five-star sentences discounts all of them, and so does everyone else.

The one source you control completely, and the only one where you decide the wording. If your hours, prices and what you sell exist only as photographs, none of it can be quoted.

What to do: Get everything into text. This is the part we do.

This is how Siri and Alexa find you, and it is the step almost everybody skips. Neither reads websites the way ChatGPT does: Siri answers out of Apple Maps, Alexa answers out of Bing and Yelp. A business that has done Google properly can still be invisible to both, and to Copilot and Apple Intelligence, which draw on the same two.

What to do: Claim both. Free, about an evening for the pair. Apple is businessconnect.apple.com and Bing is bingplaces.com. Check the hours and the category on each, because these listings are often generated automatically from old data and nobody ever goes back to look.

Still where a lot of small businesses actually publish, and still widely read. A page with current hours and recent posts is worth having even if the website carries the load.

What to do: Keep the hours current and post something now and then. A page abandoned in 2023 says you might be closed.

A mention on a tourism site, a chamber directory or a local paper is a third party saying you exist. That carries weight no self-description can.

What to do: Join the chamber if it is worth it locally. Get onto the events calendar when you do something. Answer the reporter who calls.

Charter listing sites, marina guides, contractor registries. Narrow, but they are exactly what an assistant reaches for on a narrow question.

What to do: Be listed accurately on the two or three that matter in your line of work. Check that the hours and phone on each one match your site.

Forums, local groups, threads where somebody asks where to eat. This is the hardest to influence and often the most quoted.

What to do: Nothing artificial. Posting fake recommendations about yourself is both obvious and worth less than doing the work that earns a real one.