Get recommended by AI assistants

A growing share of “find me a plumber” and “which tool should I use” now happens in an assistant rather than a search box. The answer is assembled from whatever the retrieval step returned, and review platforms are heavily represented in that.

Nobody can buy placement, and anyone selling it is selling something else.

The levers are unglamorous and mostly familiar. A consistent name, category and location everywhere. A review profile with recent reviews, because rating and count are structured fields an assistant can quote. Plain descriptions in the words customers use rather than the words your industry uses.

Presence in the directories and listicles for your category, because those are what get retrieved when the question is “best X in Y”.

Reviews matter here more than they do for conventional search, not less. Rating and review count are comparable across businesses, which makes them exactly the kind of field a model reaches for when asked to choose between three options.

Your own website matters most when it states plainly what you do, where and for whom. Pages written to rank rather than to inform have nothing in them to extract.

Ask the assistants. Run the queries a customer would run, note whether you appear and which sources are cited, repeat monthly. It is crude and it is more than almost anyone does. The full research.