Customers have stopped Googling and started asking. When someone asks an AI assistant for the best dentist, mortgage broker or physio near them, does your business come up? Here's how to make sure it does, in plain English, with no developer and about 15 minutes of work.
A few years ago, someone looking for a dentist, a mortgage broker or a physio would open Google, scroll a list of businesses, and click around. Today, a growing share of them type the question straight into ChatGPT, or read the AI answer Google now places above the search results, and simply act on the two or three names it gives back.
That shift has a hard edge: AI doesn't recommend the best business. It recommends the business it can read. If an assistant can't confidently work out what services you offer and which suburbs you serve, it leaves you out of the answer entirely, no matter how good your work is or how many five-star reviews you have.
A real example. A Brisbane dental practice we scanned has 260 Google reviews at 4.9 stars, a strong reputation, and years of happy patients. Yet when we asked AI assistants 31 versions of "best dentist in Brisbane" on 20 June 2026, it appeared in zero of them. The practices AI recommended instead, again and again, were a handful of nearby competitors. Not because they're better, but because they're easier for AI to read.
This is a solvable problem, and you can do most of it yourself. The name for this work is GEO (generative engine optimisation): the same idea as SEO, but aimed at the AI answer instead of the blue links. Below are the three fixes that move the needle most, plus a quick check on the one thing that quietly wastes the leads you do get.
You don't need a web developer, an agency, or any technical skill for the core fixes. Set aside about 15 minutes and have these two things open:
That's it. Everything below is free to do yourself. To show this works for any local business, each fix below uses a different industry in its example: a dentist, a mortgage broker, then a physio. Swap in your own services and suburbs.
Your Google Business Profile is the single most important source AI reads about your business. Assistants lean on it heavily to decide who does what, and where. Most businesses leave the three fields that matter most either generic or blank. You can open and edit yours at business.google.com/aunz/business-profile.
A category of Medical centre, Health clinic or Financial consultant tells AI almost nothing. A dentist should be Dentist (or the closer fit, like Cosmetic dentist), a broker Mortgage broker, a physio Physiotherapist. This one field does more than any other to tell AI what kind of business you are.
Add each service you offer by name. For our example dentist that's check-ups & cleans, teeth whitening, dental implants. Use the words customers use, not industry jargon. Every service you name is another question you can be matched to.
Fill in your service areas with the actual suburbs, for example West End, South Bank and Milton. "Best dentist near me" is a location question first. If AI can't tell where you are, it can't put you on the map.
Business websites love a beautiful headline. Take a mortgage broker whose homepage says "Your future, unlocked". It reads well to a human who already knows what you do. To an AI reading the page to answer "best mortgage broker in Parramatta", it says nothing.
Here's the good news: you don't have to change your headline. AI reads the whole page, not just the biggest font. Keep "Your future, unlocked" — just make sure one plain line near the top of the page names the service and the suburb in the words a customer would actually type. Three easy places to put it, no redesign needed:
Somewhere in the top of your homepage, in plain text, a customer's actual question should already be answered: what you do and where. If no line near the top says something like "home loans" and "Parramatta", add one — above the headline, in the intro sentence, or in the page title. The poetry can stay.
AI cross-checks. Before it recommends a business, it likes to see it described the same way in more than one place it trusts, industry directories, maps, review sites. The technical name for the details it matches on is NAP: Name, Address, Phone.
The trap is inconsistency. "Example Physio Clinic" on Google, "Example Physio" on one directory, an old phone number on another, and AI can't be sure they're the same business, so it plays safe and leaves you out. The fix is boring but powerful: make your Name, Address and Phone identical everywhere.
Here's the painful one. You can do all three fixes, start showing up in AI answers, and still lose the customer, because the enquiry form on your own website silently fails. Broken form handlers, misrouted emails and missing confirmations are far more common than businesses realise, and nobody tells you: the customer just assumes you didn't care to reply.
It's worth testing your own form today. Submit a real enquiry as if you were a customer and confirm it actually lands in the inbox someone checks, with a confirmation back to the sender.
Our free audit includes a one-off form-health check. If you want ongoing peace of mind, our form monitoring watches your enquiry form around the clock and alerts you the moment it breaks, from $97/month. The fixes above are yours to keep for free; monitoring is simply the doing, handled for you.
AI doesn't update the instant you hit save. Assistants re-read your profile, website and listings over the following weeks. In practice the change compounds over roughly four to eight weeks, moving you from invisible to mentioned as the sources line up.
The goal is simple: the next time a customer asks an assistant for the best in your field near them, your business is one of the names that comes back, alongside, or instead of, the competitors who currently own that answer.
Reply to us once your fixes are live and we'll run a free re-scan four weeks later, the same 20-plus AI questions for your field, so you can see your visibility against the competitors AI currently names, in black and white. No cost, no obligation.
AI recommends businesses it can read and confidently place, not simply the best ones. If your services, category and service areas aren't spelled out in the sources AI trusts, it has nothing to match a customer's question to, regardless of how many five-star reviews you have.
No. The three highest-impact fixes, your Google Business Profile, one plain-English line on your homepage, and consistent Name/Address/Phone across directories, can all be done by the business owner or manager in about 15 minutes with tools you already have.
There's no instant switch. Assistants re-read your profile, website and listings over weeks. In our experience the change compounds over roughly four to eight weeks, which is why we offer a free re-scan four weeks after you make the fixes.
Not on its own. Reviews help customers trust you once they find you, but AI has to find you first. A practice with 260 reviews at 4.9 stars can still appear in zero AI answers if its category is generic and its site never names the services and suburbs it serves.
Your Google Business Profile primary category. Make sure it names what you actually are (Dentist, Mortgage broker, Physiotherapist) rather than a generic label, then add your services by name and list the suburbs you serve. Biggest lever, and it's free.
Your free AI Visibility Audit scans ChatGPT and Google AI for your business, scores you against your local competitors, and tells you the top three things to fix. It takes 24 hours and costs nothing.
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