Get AI to recommend your local business

It's probably the single most important asset a local business has. Google Business Profile feeds the map, local search, and much of what Google, Gemini, and other connected assistants know about you in real time.

Having it created isn't enough: every field needs to be filled in. The correct primary and secondary categories, real hours (updated for holidays), every service and product you offer, answered FAQs, regular posts, and recent photos and videos of your own, not generic stock ones.

Every empty field is a question the AI can't answer about your business from your most direct source, and one it'll have to try answering by searching elsewhere, if it bothers at all.

It's not just about quantity. What matters is length, detail, whether natural keywords related to what you do show up, and whether the owner replies. An AI uses the actual language of reviews to understand what your business does better than it does by reading your own website.

A review that says "great service" adds little. One that says "they fixed our car's AC in under an hour on a Saturday in Dénia" adds context, specificity, and a trust signal a system can use and cross-check against other sources.

Google explains in its documentation on managing reviews that responding in a personalized, professional way, without incentivizing reviews in exchange for anything, is what's expected of a business and what reinforces trust for both customers and search systems themselves.

Asking for reviews systematically (at the end of every service, with a direct link) isn't optional, it's the highest-return task in this entire guide.

This has a name: NAP, for Name, Address, Phone. Add hours, website, and email on top of that. Everything has to match exactly between your Google profile, your website, your social media, and every directory you appear in.

A business that says "12 Main St" on Google and "Main Street No. 12" in a directory isn't making a serious mistake in a person's eyes, but it does introduce doubt for a system trying to confirm that both listings refer to the same entity. The more inconsistencies there are, the harder it is for the AI to build a solid, coherent business identity.

Before signing up for a new directory, it's worth having a single document with the business's exact, final details, and always copying from there, never from memory.

The goal here isn't reach or community. It's having one more verifiable signal, with recent activity, that the business exists and is still operating. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, or X, depending on the sector, work as another source confirming name, location, category, and hours.

A profile abandoned since 2023 sends exactly the opposite message from what you want: uncertainty about whether the business is still active. Minimal but consistent activity (posts, photos of real work, replies to comments) is worth more than an ambitious content strategy that gets abandoned after two months.

Local newspapers, radio, business associations, town councils, sponsorships of sports or cultural events, collaborations with schools or local organizations. Every mention from an independent third party reinforces your business's authority in a way no self-published content can match.

You don't need to land national coverage. A mention on the Dénia town council's website, in a trade association's magazine, or in a regional newspaper's write-up of an event you sponsored counts as one more external source, and it's exactly the kind of evidence a generative system looks for to confirm a business is real, active, and recognized in its area. If your business is right in Dénia, we have a dedicated guide on how to rank your business in the city, with its own seasonality and its own directories.

This isn't about writing generic SEO articles, it's about answering the specific questions people actually ask: how much does an oil change cost in Dénia?, how long does a full bathroom renovation take?, what taxes does a self-employed person pay in their first year?

This kind of direct, verifiable content works far better in front of an AI than a generic text about the industry, because it answers exactly the intent someone has when asking an assistant. It's the same logic we cover in more detail in what GEO is: answering a specific intent carries more weight than covering a topic in general.

Schema.org lets you describe your business so a machine understands it without ambiguity: LocalBusiness, Organization, Product, FAQPage, Review, Service. Google explicitly recommends marking up your business information with LocalBusiness structured data, including name, address, hours, and reviews where available, to help it understand the business and enable certain search features.

An important caveat: the markup must always match what a user sees on the page. There's no magic Schema type that guarantees a recommendation, it's a way of making data that's already true and visible easier to read. This is exactly what we work on in LLM content optimization.

The classic approach of chasing links to boost domain authority isn't what helps most here. For a local business, who links to you matters more than how many links there are: chambers of commerce, professional associations, universities, town councils, local newspapers, and professional bodies are far more useful sources than a purchased post on a generic blog.

They're also the hardest sources to fake, and that's exactly why they carry the most weight: an AI that sees your business linked from the town council or your professional body is seeing a signal nobody can buy for twenty euros.

Be especially wary of tools and agencies offering easy, large-scale links (automated exchanges, blog networks, paid directories with no editorial standards): they tend to fall under what Google defines as a link scheme and penalizes directly. We cover which practices to avoid and why in our guide on bad backlink practices.