A straight-talk guide for local business owners • Intrigue Media • June 2026
“How do I get my business to show up when someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI for a recommendation?”
We hear this question a lot right now. It’s a good one. AI search is changing how customers find businesses, and there’s a mountain of conflicting advice out there. So we’re putting everything we know in one place, in plain English.
Fair warning: some of it might save you a thousand bucks a month.
The honest truth about “AI visibility” scores
There’s a growing crowd of tools promising to measure your “AI visibility” and hand you a score. Some charge $1,000 a month for it.
Here’s the problem: nobody can reliably tell you how often your brand shows up in AI answers right now. Not us. Not them. Nobody.
That’s not us being grumpy. It’s just how AI works. Ask an AI the same question twice, and you can get two different answers. Researchers at Thinking Machines actually tested this. They asked an AI the exact same question 1,000 times, with every setting locked down to ensure consistency. They got 80 different answers. And that was the version designed to repeat itself.
Out in the real world, it’s even messier. The answer your customer sees depends on their chat history, their location, the time of day, and even how busy the servers are at that moment. You can’t see any of that, and you definitely can’t control it.
So a “visibility score” is basically a photo of a moving target. Taken once a day. With the lens cap half on.
Then why is everyone selling a score?
Because a number is easy to sell. “You’re at 34%! Pay us and we’ll get you to 60%!” sounds great in a sales pitch.
But most of these tools check each question once a day, then dress that single snapshot up as a confident percentage. You’d be paying premium prices for a number that looks precise and isn’t. That’s not a metric you can run a business on. That’s a horoscope with a dashboard.
“So, Intrigue, why aren’t YOU pushing AI visibility?”
Fair question. We are. We just won’t sell you a number we can’t stand behind.
While others chase shaky data, we’d rather do the work that actually pays off: making your content better and building it the way Google and Microsoft have openly said AI search rewards. Do that, and when real measurement arrives (it’s starting to), you’re already ahead. Instead of a year’s budget down on a dashboard that never proved anything.
We’d rather get you calls, quotes, and booked jobs than sell you a vanity metric.
What AI search actually rewards
Now the good news. The companies building these AI tools have already told us what gets a business recommended. There’s no secret handshake. Google says it flat out: showing up in AI search is still just good, solid SEO. (We dug into the bigger shift in how Google’s AI search is changing for local businesses.) Four things move the needle:
- Genuinely helpful content. Written from real experience on your real projects, not generic filler. Start your key pages by directly answering the question a customer would actually ask. AI pulls from the clearest, most useful part of a page. (See our take on content that wins.)
- A clear, well-built website. Sensible headings, fast pages, a layout both humans and robots can follow. Same local SEO groundwork that’s always mattered. (That’s the backbone of our SEO work.)
- Strong trust signals. Real reviews on the sites your customers actually use. A complete, current Google Business Profile. Clear contact info. Real humans behind the business. AI leans hard on these when recommending local companies. (More on why reviews are your #1 growth lever.)
- Being talked about around the web. A big chunk of your AI visibility doesn’t happen on your website at all. It’s the reviews and conversations about you on Google, Yelp, Reddit, and the forums your customers read. One analysis of billions of AI citations found that Reddit was the single most-cited source across the major AI engines. Yes, Reddit. When real people say good things about you out there, AI takes notes. (Here’s how to turn reviews and mentions into a marketing machine.)
Also worth knowing what Google says to ignore: you don’t need special “AI files,” you don’t need to chop your content into confetti, and fake mentions can backfire. A lot of “AI optimization” advice out there is solving problems that don’t exist.
Real data is coming, straight from the source
Here’s the part that really matters. The AI platforms themselves are starting to share their own numbers. Not a third-party scraping and guessing. Data straight from the horse’s mouth.
Google has started rolling out Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, showing how often your pages appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover, broken down by page, country, device, and date. Two honest notes: it’s still in testing, so most businesses can’t see it yet. And for now, it shows impressions (how often you appeared), not clicks, with more metrics promised (here are the details). Microsoft has been moving the same way with its own first-party reporting. None of it is complete yet, but the direction is unmistakable.
That’s exactly why we won’t sell you a scraped “visibility score” today. The real measurement is coming from the platforms themselves. The moment it’s available for your business, we’ll use it to set an actual baseline. Until then, your money is better spent on the work that pays off no matter what the tools do. (Google’s guide to optimizing for AI search and Bing’s guidance on getting cited back all of this up.)
Questions you’re probably asking
How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT and other AI search results? There’s no button to press. AI picks who to recommend based on three things working together: genuinely helpful content on your site, consistent business details (name, address, phone, and Google Business Profile all matching), and what trustworthy outside sources say about you. Nail all three, and you become a business AI feels safe recommending.
Should I buy an AI visibility tool or an AI search tracking tool? Not yet. The data isn’t reliable enough to justify spending $200 to $1,000 a month, and the score will wander on its own whether you do anything or not. Put that budget into your content, your website, and your reviews. Those actually move you up.
Does showing up in AI search replace the SEO I’m already doing? No, it builds on it. Google says outright that showing up in AI search runs on the same fundamentals as good SEO and local SEO. Strong content and a clean, trustworthy site do double duty.
If I only have time for one or two things this week, where do I start? Two moves. First, take your three or four most important service pages and rewrite the opening lines to answer, in plain words, the exact question a customer would ask out loud, think “How much does a backyard redesign cost in Scottsdale?” instead of “Welcome to our services.” Second, ask your last five happy customers for a Google review. That hits the two things AI weighs most heavily: clear answers and a real reputation.
The bottom line
AI search matters, and now is the time to get ready for it. But the win won’t come from buying a slick visibility score. It comes from building a site that’s genuinely strong and trustworthy, then measuring the real thing once the platforms hand over their own numbers.
That’s where we point our clients. It’s the honest play.
Want to know whether your site is set up to be found by AI search? That assessment is built into your Marketing Action Plan. Let’s walk through it together.
About the author
Mick Selman, SEO & Digital Optimization Strategist at Intrigue Media, a marketing partner built exclusively for landscape and outdoor-living companies.