More people now ask an AI assistant who to hire: “Who’s a good plumber near me?” “Which accountant should I talk to?” If you run a small business, it’s natural to wonder whether your name comes up, and what you can do if it doesn’t.
There’s no shortage of people promising to get you “ranked in ChatGPT”. I want to give you something more useful: what these answers actually look like, what our own research found, what you can check yourself this week, and what nobody can honestly promise.
What happens when someone asks an AI who to hire
When you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity for a recommendation, you usually don’t get a list of ten links. You get a short list of names, often with a sentence about each, and sometimes the websites the answer drew on.
That changes the game in two ways. The list is short, so there’s less room to appear. And the answer reads like advice, so the businesses on it get a kind of endorsement that a search result never gave them.
What our research found
We study this directly. Our first benchmark looked at residential HVAC companies in one Northern Virginia market: we asked four AI assistants the same set of customer questions, in fresh sessions, twice, and kept every answer and every source it cited. It’s one industry in one market, so take it as a careful look at one case, not a rule for every business. Here’s what we saw:
- There is no single AI ranking. Visibility varied a lot from one assistant to another. A company that showed up often on one could be nearly absent on another.
- Some businesses show up far more than others. The most visible company appeared far more often than some long-established competitors.
- One search is an anecdote. Ask the same question twice and you can get a different list, especially on some assistants. Any claim based on a single search should make you suspicious.
- The question matters. Who shows up changed with how the customer asked: an AC repair, a full replacement, a heat-pump installation.
- Being cited isn’t the same as being recommended. A company’s own website could appear among the sources without that company being one of the names recommended, and the reverse.
What we don’t know yet is why one business shows up more than another. We’ve compared the businesses on many observable things, and none of them explains it on its own. Anyone who tells you exactly how ChatGPT ranks businesses is guessing.
What you can check yourself this week
You don’t need a tool to get a first picture. Set aside half an hour:
- Write down 3–5 questions your customers would actually ask. Use their words, not yours: “Who’s a reliable electrician in [your town] for an old house?” rather than your company’s tagline.
- Ask each question on at least two assistants, such as ChatGPT and Gemini. Use a fresh chat (or a private window) so your own history doesn’t color the answer.
- Ask each question twice. If your name shows up once out of two tries, that’s different from showing up every time.
- Write down what you see: whether you’re named, who is named instead, and which websites the answer cites.
- Look at those cited websites. Are you listed there? Is your information correct?
Repeat it once a month with the same questions. A simple log beats a single screenshot.
What’s sensible to do (whatever AI does with it)
Nobody has shown which changes make an AI assistant recommend a business, including us. But some things are worth doing because they help the customers who do find you, wherever they come from:
- Make your basic facts consistent everywhere: business name, address or service area, phone, hours and the services you actually offer. On your website, your Google Business Profile and the directories in your industry.
- Say plainly what you do and for whom. A page that clearly answers “do you serve my area?” and “do you handle this kind of job?” helps a human decide, whatever it does for a machine.
- Fix wrong information where you find it, especially on the sites the AI answers cited in your check.
- Keep doing what earns real customers’ trust. Good work and honest communication matter more than any trick.
What nobody can promise
Be careful with anyone who offers:
- guaranteed placement in ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI answers,
- a specific percentage increase or a timeline to “rank”,
- a secret list of “AI ranking factors”, or
- results based on a single search they ran for you.
A trustworthy answer sounds more like: “Here’s how you show up today, across several assistants and questions. Here’s what we’d check first. We’ll measure again later and tell you honestly what changed, including if nothing did.”
That’s the standard we hold ourselves to. We’re setting up the same kind of before-and-after test on our own website, juvra.ai, and we’ll share what we find.
Frequently asked questions
Want to know how your business shows up today?
On a free discovery call, we can look at how your business comes up when customers ask AI assistants and search engines, and what we’d check first. We’ll also look at what happens after someone finds you, because being found only matters if the inquiry gets answered.