How ChatGPT and Gemini Decide Which Businesses to Recommend

A quiet shift is underway in how people find businesses. Instead of searching Google and scrolling results, more and more people are simply asking — “who’s a good SEO agency in Adelaide?”, “best physio for jaw pain near me?” — and taking the AI’s answer at face value. When ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI answers name a few businesses, those businesses get the customer. The rest don’t even get seen.

So the obvious question for any business owner: how does an AI decide who to recommend — and how do you become one of the names it gives? It’s early, and nobody has a perfect formula, but the influences are becoming clear. (This emerging practice even has a name now — AI Engine Optimisation, or AIEO, also called GEO or AEO.) Here’s what matters.

AIs don’t “know” you — they assemble you

An AI doesn’t have a private opinion of your business. When asked for a recommendation, it pulls together what it can find about you across the web — your website, your reviews, directories, articles that mention you, your social profiles — and synthesises an answer. So the goal isn’t to “rank” in the old sense. It’s to make sure that everywhere the AI looks, it finds a clear, consistent, credible picture of who you are and what you do.

That reframes a lot. You’re not optimising a single page; you’re shaping the overall impression the web gives of your business.

What appears to influence whether you get recommended

1. Clear, factual content on your own site

AIs favour content that plainly states what you do, where, and for whom — and that answers real questions directly. Vague, fluffy copy is hard for a machine to extract a recommendation from. Pages that clearly say “we’re an Adelaide SEO agency that does X for Y” give the AI something concrete to repeat.

2. Being mentioned and cited elsewhere

If reputable other websites — directories, local press, industry sites, your clients — mention your business, that corroborates your existence and credibility. AIs lean on this “is this entity real and well-regarded?” signal heavily, much as search engines do with links.

3. Consistent identity across the web

Your business name, location and what you do should match everywhere it appears. Inconsistency (different names, old addresses, conflicting descriptions) makes you look unreliable to both search engines and AIs, and weakens the picture they assemble.

4. Reviews

Genuine reviews — especially on your Google Business Profile — are both a credibility signal and a source of language the AI can draw on. “People consistently praise their responsiveness and honest reporting” is exactly the kind of thing a recommendation engine likes to have evidence for.

5. Structured data and machine-readability

Behind the scenes, structured data (schema) and a fast, clean website make it easier for machines to read and trust your content. There’s even an emerging convention — a file called llms.txt — for spelling out the key facts about your business in a form AI tools can pick up directly. It’s early days, but the direction is clear: the more machine-readable and unambiguous you are, the easier you are to recommend.

What this means in practice

The reassuring part: most of this overlaps with good SEO and good marketing. There’s no separate “AI marketing” you need to buy. A business that’s genuinely well-presented online — clear content, strong reviews, consistent details, mentioned by others, technically sound — is exactly the business an AI tends to recommend. The fundamentals just matter more, and ambiguity costs more.

The risk is the opposite: businesses that are invisible, inconsistent, or vague online won’t just lose Google clicks — they’ll be left out of the AI answer entirely, which is even less forgiving than page two of Google.

Where to start

If you want to be the business an AI names, start with the basics done unusually well:

• Make your website clearly and factually state what you do, where, and for whom.
• Get and maintain genuine reviews on your Google Business Profile.
• Make sure your details are identical everywhere online.
• Earn mentions on other credible sites.

This is a moving target, and we’re watching it closely as it develops — it’s exactly what AI Search Optimisation (AIEO) is about. If you’d like to understand how visible your business is to AI search today — and what would move the needle — get in touch.