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Feature: Make AI Recommend Your Business (4 min)
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You search Google the way you always have, but lately you read the AI answer at the top and rarely scroll to the links beneath it. Your customers are doing the same, and a growing share skip Google altogether and ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini who to do business with. The question those AI assistants answer is whether to put your business in front of that customer or someone else’s. You have more say in that answer than you’d think.
One note before we start: The Co. Letter takes no payment, commission, or anything of value from any company named here.
The assistants doing the talking
Three names cover most of the traffic. ChatGPT still leads, though by mid-2026 its share of the market slipped below half for the first time. Gemini (on Google) is a close and fast-rising second, because Gemini is the engine behind the AI answers you already see sitting above your Google results. Claude, the one I’d guess you reach for, runs third and is growing faster than either. Behind them are Microsoft’s Copilot, built into Word and Windows, Perplexity, which people use for researched answers with sources, and Grok over on X. For most small business owners, the takeaway is shorter than the list: your customers are asking ChatGPT and the AI inside Google search (Gemini), so those are the two you need to win over about your business.
You don’t train them, you feed them
You can’t sit an AI down and brief it on your company the way you would a new hire. What you can do is control what it reads. Some assistants answer from what they absorbed in training, others search the live web while you wait, but all of them lean on the same thing: clear, consistent, trustworthy information about you, repeated across the places they trust. Feed them good facts and they repeat your facts. Leave the facts vague or contradictory and they either guess or pass you over.
The sources fall into two families. Google’s assistants, Gemini and the AI answers in search, draw heavily on your Google Business Profile, your Maps listing, and your reviews; Google has even started letting you connect that profile straight to Gemini. ChatGPT and the broad-web tools cast a wider net, your own site plus outside listings like Yelp and industry directories. One analysis of millions of AI citations found close to half of what ChatGPT cites comes from those third-party listings, not your website. So, the job isn’t one thing, it’s making your story line up everywhere an AI assistant might look.
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The method, in an hour a month
You’ve built the basics already, or you can, by following the steps outlined in our earlier piece, AI can’t find your business. That’s a problem. It walks through the simple site, the claimed Google profile, and the accurate listings.
Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, then keep it current. It’s free, it feeds Google’s AI directly, and a stale profile reads to the AI assistant as a business that may have closed. Set your hours, your services, a plain description, and a few photos.
Make your name, address, and phone identical everywhere. If your site says “Riverside Plumbing” and a directory says “Riverside Plumbing and Drain,” an AI assistant can’t tell whether you’re one business or two, so it hedges by leaving you out. Pick one version and match it on every listing.
Answer your customers’ real questions on your site, in their words. “We offer same-day AC repair across Tampa” gives an assistant something to repeat; “best-in-class comfort solutions” gives it nothing. Write the questions people actually ask, and answer each in a sentence or two.
Earn a few recent reviews. Ask a handful of good customers for a Google review this month and reply to each one. Assistants read fresh reviews as the sign of a real, active business worth naming.
Check what they’re already saying
Here is a ten-minute test that tells you where to focus. Open ChatGPT, then Gemini, and ask the way a customer would: something like “best [what you do] in [your town].” See whether you show up, and whether the description sounds like you. A mismatch, the wrong service, an old address, a competitor named instead of you, points straight at the listing that needs fixing. Run it more than once, because the answers shift from one try to the next, and a single result isn’t worth much.
What this means for your ad budget
You might be tempted to fix all of this by buying your way back to the top of Google, and that instinct isn’t altogether wrong; when the click stops landing on your page, a paid slot is one way to stay in front of a ready buyer. But ads stop the day you stop paying. Being the business the AI assistant names costs you an hour or so a month and keeps working while you sleep. For most owners the cheaper, more durable win is the work above, with ads as a supplement rather than the substitute.
None of this takes a marketing agency or a line of code. It takes facts about your business that are clear, the same everywhere, and current.
The Co. Letter shares practical business thinking, not legal, tax, or financial advice. For decisions specific to your situation, consult a licensed professional in your state.
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