The problem
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.
What actually works
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”.