Does AI recommend your business?

Ask an AI answer engine, ChatGPT, Google AI Mode or Perplexity, who the best tradesperson or restaurant is in your suburb and you get three or four names. One detail stands out. The sources they cite are often not the businesses' own websites but trade directories such as hipages and Google reviews. That holds even for businesses sitting at the top of Google Maps for the same search.

That tells you two things. AI picks a handful of answers rather than a page of results, and a good website on its own is no longer enough to be one of them.

A busy restaurant with a waiter walking between full tables — A full room starts with a search. More of those searches now end in an AI answer. Photo: Negley Stockman, Unsplash

The front door has moved

Australian businesses live on Google. Most owners we meet already have the basics of SEO in place, a Google Business Profile, reviews and a page that ranks for the suburb. That work still matters. What has changed is what the customer sees first.

A Google search used to give them a map and ten blue links. Now an AI answer often sits above the results, and in ChatGPT or Perplexity the answer is all there is, three or four names and a sentence about each. If your business is not in those few lines, the customer does not know it exists. There is no page two.

McKinsey's October 2025 report, New front door to the internet, found that half of consumers already use AI-powered search. And in Squarespace's April 2026 survey of more than 1,000 small-business owners, six in ten said they "don't know where to start" with AI search. Checking takes five minutes, so start there.

A five-minute check

Search Google for "[suburb] [what you do]", for example "Strathfield Korean restaurant" or "Melbourne accountant for small business". An AI Overview now often appears above the results, and AI Mode in the Google app gives the full version. If you use ChatGPT or Perplexity, ask the same question there.

If your business appears, note which page each engine cites. If it does not, that is not a crisis. It usually means the basics below are missing, and all three are free.

A woman at a cafe counter checking her phone — Five minutes at the counter is enough to see what AI says about you. Photo: Dan Burton, Unsplash

Three things you can do today, for free

1. Complete your Google Business Profile

AI answers quote the same details every time, the star rating, the review count, opening hours and address. A profile with gaps, or reviews that stopped two years ago, drops off the shortlist. Make sure the business name, address and phone number match your website character for character. Small differences mean AI cannot tell it is the same business.

2. Reply to reviews

Good or bad, a reply from the owner reads as "this business is open and paying attention". If you have no recent reviews, ask three regular customers this week.

3. Put questions and answers on your website, as text

AI reads sentences. It does not read a photo of a menu. Take the five questions customers ask most often on the phone, such as "Do you deliver?", "Is there parking?" and "How do I book?", and answer each in two or three sentences on your site. On WordPress or Wix this is a ten-minute edit.

Where development starts

Those three steps make a real difference. Most businesses stop there, and the next three items are why they stop.

Structured data. Code that visitors never see but Google and AI engines read. It states, in a fixed format, what the business is, when it is open, which areas it serves and what the common questions are (the LocalBusiness and FAQPage schemas). Most small-business websites we look at do not have it.

Speed, HTTPS and mobile. A site that takes five seconds to load, shows "Not secure" in the address bar or breaks on a phone gets pushed back by Google long before AI is involved.

Platform limits. Default Wix and Shopify themes have nowhere to put that code, or need another plugin for it. Plugins pile up, the site slows down and the ranking slides again. We call it plugin hell.

None of this is new. The local SEO work that puts a business at the top of Google Maps is exactly what AI engines read now. The businesses that did it properly show up first there too.

Send us your business name

If you want to know how your business shows up today, send us the business name and suburb. We will run a health check, from your website's SEO basics and Google Business Profile to how you show up in Google AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity, and reply with what we see and what to fix first. No charge, and you do not need a website to ask.