How to Get Recommended by AI

More of your customers are asking ChatGPT and Google's AI “who should I hire?” before they ever type a search. Here is how to get your business cited and recommended in those answers.

Local business owners keep asking the same question: how do I get recommended by AI? The answer is not a new trick. It is the same discipline that has worked for 20 years (good content, a solid website, and reviews), pointed at how AI actually chooses who to mention.

Start by intercepting intent

Getting recommended by AI comes down to intercepting intent: understanding what people are searching, why they are searching it, and what result they are trying to get. Once you know those three things, you create content on your website that answers the question directly, and AI pulls from that content when it builds an answer.

The important shift: your customer often is not searching for your service yet. They are searching for the problem they have.

Answer the problem, not just the service

Say you run a water restoration company. Someone whose house just flooded does not type “water restoration company.” They type something like “my house just flooded, what do I do now?” AI answers exactly that (prioritize safety, stop the source of water, document everything), and only at the very end suggests reaching out to a restoration company.

So the play is to build hyper-local content that satisfies the searcher's intent at the local level. A blog post on exactly how to shut off common water sources in Vancouver, WA. How to prioritize safety first in a Clark County home. When everything on the page satisfies the search at the local level, that is how you get cited on a search like this.

Win the comparison stage with alternative pages

Once a searcher knows they need a restoration company, they move into the comparison stage: they ask AI for options and weigh them against each other. To get surfaced here, create alternative pages that target the competitors most likely to show up in those AI answers.

A page at /alternatives/[competitor] built around why you are a better fit for certain customers gives AI (and the searcher) a reason to put you in the consideration set. This is the inflection point between middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel, the moment people are actively comparing vendors, and it is one of the most effective ways to capture those leads. (See how this fits your overall site structure.)

Reviews close the loop

Watch what actually happens in an AI-driven decision: AI names a few companies, then the person leaves the chat, goes to Google, and checks reviews. A company with 4.9 stars and hundreds of local reviews that is clearly based in Vancouver wins the click. Your Google Business Profile and review volume are what convert an AI mention into a phone call, so they are part of the same system, not an afterthought.

It is still just good SEO

Here is the reassuring part: getting leads from AI is the same thing SEO has always been. Content that satisfies intent, a well-structured website, and authority signals like reviews and links. AI rewards the fundamentals. It just reads them to build an answer instead of a list of blue links.

Architecturally, Google's AI answers sit as a separate system layered on top of the classic ranking stack, and they still pull from the same retrieval, quality, and authority signals underneath. That is why there is no separate “AI SEO” trick: being eligible for the AI answer means being strong in the fundamentals the underlying system already rewards. We map out that stack in how Google search actually works.