How do I get AI to recommend my business?

Write clear, plain text on your own site about what you do and where. Get genuinely mentioned on the kinds of pages AI models actually read — reviews, local directories, "best of" roundups. Keep your business name, category, and location described the same way everywhere. None of it is instant, and none of it is a trick — it's the same groundwork that helps real customers find and trust you.

Start with your own website

Before anything else, make sure your own site actually says, in plain sentences, what your business does, who it's for, and where it's located. This sounds obvious, but a lot of small business sites lean on a logo, a slogan, and a photo gallery, with almost no real text. AI models — and search engines — need words to work with. A homepage that says "Family-run bakery in [town], specialty sourdough and custom celebration cakes, open Tuesday to Saturday" is worth more to your visibility than any amount of design polish.

If your website team can add "structured data" — a bit of behind-the-scenes code that spells out your business name, category, address, and hours in a format machines can read directly, instead of guessing from paragraphs — that helps too. You don't need to understand the code yourself; you just need to know it exists and ask for it.

Get mentioned where AI actually looks

A model can only recall what it has been exposed to. That mostly means:

• Reviews on your Google Business Profile, Yelp, or the review site that matters most in your industry.
• Local and category directories — the kind of listing sites specific to your city or trade, not just the big national ones.
• "Best of" articles and roundups written by local bloggers, local news, or industry sites. These are exactly the kind of page that gets absorbed into an AI model's sense of "who's good in this category."
• Forums and Q&A sites where people in your area or industry already discuss recommendations.

You don't need to be everywhere at once. A handful of real, specific mentions on the sites your actual customers already trust will do more than a long list of low-quality directory submissions.

Say the same thing about yourself everywhere

If your business is called "Wrenfield Coffee Co." on your website, "Wrenfield Coffee" on Google, and "Wrenfield's" on a local directory, with three slightly different addresses, it's harder for anything to be confident these all refer to the same business. Pick one name, one category, and one address format, and use it consistently across your website, social profiles, and every listing you control. This is one of the cheapest, highest-leverage fixes available, because it costs nothing but a bit of admin time.

What doesn't help

A few shortcuts are worth naming, because they're tempting and they don't work — or actively backfire:

• Keyword-stuffing your homepage. Repeating your city and category dozens of times reads as spam to a human, and doesn't make an AI model any more likely to summarize you accurately.
• Buying fake reviews. Beyond being dishonest and against most platforms' rules, a model can't tell a good review from a paid one, but a real customer reading it later definitely can — and the damage to trust outlasts any short-term visibility bump.
• Hidden text aimed at crawlers. Text meant only for machines and hidden from human visitors is a well-known manipulation pattern that search engines and AI crawlers alike are built to discount or penalize.

Everything that genuinely works here is also just good for your actual customers: clearer information, real reviews, and consistent details. There isn't a separate, secret playbook for AI that skips the fundamentals.

This takes time — and that's normal

None of the above changes an AI model's answer instantly. Models are updated on their own schedules, and some only refresh what they "know" occasionally rather than continuously. Treat this the same way you'd treat any other long-term visibility work: steady, genuine effort compounds, and there's no legitimate way to shortcut it. For more on how AI visibility relates to traditional search visibility, see what AI visibility actually is.