There is an assumption that showing up in AI answers requires something exotic. For a local business, it mostly requires the two things owners routinely put off: an accurate Google Business Profile and a steady flow of reviews.
Assistants need a source they can trust
A language model has no way to verify that you are open until six on Saturdays. It looks for the claim in places that tend to be right. For local businesses, that means your Google Business Profile first, then your website, then directories and review platforms. When those agree, the assistant will state your hours confidently. When they conflict, it hedges or names someone else.
This is why a profile with the wrong category, a missing service list, or last year's hours quietly costs you recommendations you never knew were happening.
Reviews are evidence, not decoration
Ask an assistant why it recommended a particular contractor and you will usually get some version of "consistently positive recent reviews mentioning responsiveness and cleanup." That is a summary of review text. The words your customers use become the words the assistant uses about you.
Two things follow. Volume and recency matter, because a business with forty reviews from this year reads as active and one with twelve from 2021 does not. And the content matters, because reviews that mention the specific service and the specific town give the assistant something concrete to work with.
Responding matters more than it used to
Replies are public text attached to your business. A calm, specific reply to a hard review often reads better to both a customer and a machine than a perfect five star average with silence underneath it. It also gives you a place to state facts the review got wrong.
A short checklist
Confirm your primary category is the one customers would actually search, and add the secondary categories that fit.
List every service you sell, with the same names you use on your website.
Set your service area to the towns you really cover, not a fifty mile circle.
Keep hours, holiday hours, and phone number identical across your profile, your site, and your listings.
Ask for a review at the moment the customer is happiest, and answer every one that comes in.
None of this is new advice. What is new is that it now feeds a second channel: the answer a customer gets before they ever see a list of websites. We handle this work as part of reviews and reputation and as part of SEO, not as an extra. See /reviews-and-reputation and /ai-search-visibility.