What it actually means to show up when someone asks AI for a recommendation

Someone asks ChatGPT for a good accountant in their town, and it names three firms. Here’s the part most owners miss: something decided those three, and it wasn’t random — and it wasn’t an ad.

More people are starting this way. Instead of searching, scrolling, and judging for themselves, they ask an assistant and act on the short answer it gives back. Which means there’s a new question worth asking about your own business: when someone asks AI for what you do, in the place you do it, can it find you well enough to say your name?

How does an AI assistant decide who to name?

It reads. When you ask one of these tools for a recommendation, it pulls from sources it can already read and has reason to trust — a business’s own site, the way that business is described in plain terms, listings and profiles that line up with each other. Then it writes a sentence or two naming a few options.

The key word is read. It isn’t ranking pages the way a search engine does. It’s looking for clear, specific, consistent statements about who you are, what you do, and where — and stitching the trustworthy ones into an answer. If your site says plainly “we’re a Burlington accounting firm that works with trades businesses,” that’s a clean thing to lift. If it says “we deliver tailored financial solutions,” there’s nothing there to repeat.

Why most small-business sites are invisible to it

Not because they’re bad. Because they were built for a person clicking around, not a machine reading quickly.

A lot of small-business sites bury the basics. The city you’re in is in the footer, or only on the contact page. What you actually do is wrapped in the kind of language that sounds professional and means nothing. The specifics — who you serve, what’s different about how you work — live in your head and in your client calls, not on the page. A person can squint past all that. A machine writing a one-paragraph answer can’t. It needs the plain version, stated outright.

What actually moves this — and what doesn’t

What doesn’t: clever copy, more pages, paying for something. There’s no slot to buy.

What does is unglamorous. Say what you do in plain words, near the top, where it can’t be missed. Name the place you work and the kind of client you work with. Make sure the way you’re described is consistent everywhere a machine might check, so the story doesn’t contradict itself. And give it real, specific things to repeat — a clear service, a clear focus — instead of language built to impress.

It’s the same idea as being easy to refer in person. The friend who sends you business can describe what you do in one sentence. The goal here is the same, just written down where a machine can find it.

Try this yourself

Open the assistant you use and ask it the way a potential customer would — “who’s a good [what you do] in [your town]?” See whether you come up, and see who does. Then ask it a follow-up: “what does [your business name] do?” Read the answer back honestly. If it’s vague, or wrong, or empty — that’s not a verdict on your business. It’s a fair picture of what your site is currently telling a machine, which is a thing you can fix.

That small test will tell you more than any audit. It’s worth ten minutes.

If you’d rather have someone run that check properly and tell you what’s getting in the way, the free Website Scorecard does exactly that — I take a look and send it back by email.