Get recommended when customers ask AI
Plain-English guides on showing up when your customers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI who to hire. New here? Start with AI visibility for local business, a good first read on what it means for a local business.
More guides
AI Search and SEO for Local Dentists
Do they take my insurance, can they see me today, what will it cost, and what do other patients say? Those are the questions patients now put to AI assistants, and this field guide shows where on your site and Business Profile each answer has to live.
Do Directory Listings Affect AI Visibility? What 2026 Research Shows
We sorted the 1,634 citations behind one plumber's AI answers and read every 2025 and 2026 study on listings. A few directories matter per assistant, the long tail doesn't, and a complete listing still isn't a recommendation.
How AI Visibility Tools Charge Agencies, Per Client vs. Flat Pricing in 2026
AI visibility tools bill agencies in one of three ways, per client, per question, or one flat fee. Here's what each one costs at 5, 10, and 25 clients, with 2026 vendor pages as the source.
Why Does ChatGPT Have Outdated Information About Your Business?
ChatGPT can quote hours you changed last spring or a price you never charged, and each kind of stale fact has a different source behind it. We tested our own business with search off and on, then traced the four places an old fact hides and what corrects each one.
Google AI Overviews vs. AI Mode, Explained for Local Businesses
One sits on top of the results, the other replaces them. We ran the same Boise plumber search both ways, then pulled the 2025 and 2026 research on how often each appears, what each cites, and where the click goes.
Does ChatGPT Use Google or Bing? What It Means for Local Businesses
ChatGPT doesn't run on Google. It searches Bing's data, an index OpenAI built with its own crawler, and licensed sources like Yelp, and the mix keeps shifting. A dated timeline, the overlap numbers, and what that changes for a local business.
How Long Does It Take AI to Notice Website Changes in 2026?
The first AI crawler can reach a new page within minutes, and a month later ChatGPT may still not cite it. Here are the measured 2026 lags for each assistant, why they differ, and what shortens them.
How to Evaluate AI Visibility Tracking Tools in 2026
A single AI answer is a coin flip, so a tracker's number is only as good as how it was collected. Five questions to ask any vendor, the 2026 studies behind each, and a scorecard you can fill in during a trial.
How to Get Your Business Recommended by Gemini
Gemini draws local answers from Google's own map records, so the profile you may not have opened in a year has a lot to say about whether it names you. What it reads, six fixes in order, and a weekly test.
How to Use ChatGPT to Find What to Fix for AI Visibility
A heating and air company with thousands of Google reviews was named in 2 of 39 AI answers last month. Here's how four plain questions to an AI assistant turned its tracking data into 24 sorted fixes, and how to ask them in ChatGPT.
How to Resell AI Visibility Audits to Your Clients
The scan behind an AI visibility audit adds little cost per client, and the readout can sell for a real fee. Here's how to price it, scope it, and pitch it, shown on a real site that scored 70 out of 100.
Why AI Knows You but Doesn't Recommend You
In a 2026 study, six AI models never once suggested L.L.Bean to someone asking for a hiking jacket, then named it in nearly nine answers out of ten when researchers rewrote the prompt in the brand's own marketing language. Being known and being recommended are different things, and a three-prompt test shows which one you're missing.
How to Track AI Visibility for Multiple Clients in One Dashboard
Five steps to track every client's AI visibility from one account, with one roll-up you sort each week. Includes a prompt template, the six columns to watch, and a real three-client example.
How to Tell If AI Recommends Your Local Competitors
Twelve AI answers to one question named 24 different rivals, and the owner tracked four of them. Here's how to find out which competitors the assistants are sending your customers to, and what to do once you know.
Why AI Names Your Competitor and Not You
When an assistant answers a customer without reading a page of yours, it names you about three times in a hundred. When it reads one, about half the time. A 2026 study of 35,000 answers found four gates between the question and your name, and here's how to tell which one you're failing.
What AI Shopping Assistants Ask Before Recommending Your Business
Before an AI shopping assistant names a business, it asks five questions in a fixed order. We pulled them from what OpenAI, Google, and Amazon publish about their shopping features, then checked them against ten captured answers for one manufacturer we track. It was named three times, and every miss traces to a question it couldn't answer.
What Shipped in Lighthouse Local in September 2026
Everything that shipped in September. Your AI assistant can now work from your dashboard, AI Answers shows mentions and citations separately, totals count only the days we checked, and a few things for white-label partners.
Is AI Visibility Software a Must-Have in 2026, or Can You Wait a Year?
Must-have or defer? A decision framework for AI visibility software in 2026, with two real tracker histories, five questions that settle it, and how to wait without losing the year.
How to Set Up an AI Search Visibility Dashboard
An AI search visibility dashboard is four feeds on one page. Two connect live, two you log each Monday. Here's the build, with our own site's Search Console numbers as the worked example, and these five questions to ask it every week.
AI Visibility for Local Business, What It Is and How to Get It
AI visibility for a local business is the share of AI answers to local questions that name you. One Miami car wash gets named in three quarters of ChatGPT answers and six percent of Gemini's. Here's why the gap exists, where the names come from, and the six levers that close it.
White-Label AI Visibility Tracking for Agencies, How It Works
Yes, any agency can offer AI visibility tracking under its own brand. See the four setup steps, what a client sees, and real numbers from an agency running five clients from one dashboard.
Lighthouse Local Now Has an MCP Server
Connect Lighthouse Local to the assistant you already use and ask what AI says about your business, which questions skip you, and what to fix first. Read-only, your normal login, about five minutes to set up.
Do Press Release Backlinks Pass Authority?
No. Google names press release links in its spam policy, and the wire services tag them nofollow before Google ever sees them. Here's what a release still does for a local business, what AI assistants do with wire copy, and when it's worth the money.
Internal Linking for Local SEO in 2026, Tested on Our Own Site
We crawled our own site before writing this. Every page was two clicks from home, and six of our 25 blog posts still had no article linking to them. Here's the link map, anchor text, and thirty-minute audit that fix the same gap on a local business site.
AI Search and SEO for Local Pharmacies
More than 2,000 pharmacies closed in 2025, and the patients they left behind are asking Google and AI assistants where to go next. This field guide covers the local SEO and AI search work that gets an independent pharmacy found, trusted, and named.
How to Use TypeSafe's Jev Model
A URL slug convinced our audit that a national software firm was a neighborhood shop. We handed the question to Jev, TypeSafe's new judgment model, and wrote down everything we learned about questions, thresholds, fallbacks, and limits.
Why AI Recommendations Differ by User
You asked ChatGPT about your own business and it named you. Or it didn't. Either way, your screen is the one that looks least like a customer's, because memory, location, and plain randomness bend every answer. Here's how to ask like a stranger.
Why the AI SEO Checklist Stops Working
You added the stats, the expert quote, and the FAQ. So did the three businesses AI names ahead of you. A 2026 study tested what happens when everyone runs the same playbook, and the answer is to read the competition before you rewrite a word.
What Does AI Say About Your Business?
Ask an assistant about your business and you get a set of claims, some wrong, some stale. Here's an eight-prompt audit to pull them out, a sheet to trace each one to its source, and the fixes that stick.
How to Improve Website Performance With AI
Your site is slow for its own reasons, and a generic list won't find them. Here's how to run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools, read the report, and hand the real results to AI, round by round, until the score stops moving.
The Branded vs. Unbranded AI Visibility Gap
Ask an assistant about your business by name and it cites your site almost every time. Ask it who to call in your town and your site nearly vanishes. Here's why the two questions run differently, and what the businesses that get named anyway have in common.
How to Track What ChatGPT Says About Your Business
You can't see why an AI assistant picks one business over another. You can see every answer it gives. Here's how our tracker asks, stores, and reads what ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI say about you.
How AI Answer Engines Source Content vs. Traditional Search
Google ranks a page and sends a click. An AI answer engine fans out a dozen searches, reads passages, and cites a handful of sources, often without a link. Here's how each machine picks what it uses, with 2026 data.
10 AI Visibility Tools for Local Businesses in 2026
Ten AI visibility tools for local businesses, scored on five things a one-location business cares about. Free snapshots, trackers under $50, the band where coverage fills out, and the prompts to load on day one.
What Is a White-Label AI Audit?
Follow one roofing company through a white-label AI audit, from a cold email to a scored report to a lead in your inbox, and see where the audit stops and the tracker starts.
How to Improve Brand Visibility in AI Search
AI answers already send buyers who convert better and spend more. Here's the 2026 research on how the assistants pick what to cite, a worked revenue calculation you can copy, and the order to fix things in.
How to Track Your Brand's Visibility in AI Search
Ask an assistant the same question twice and you can get two different businesses. Here's how to track your brand's AI visibility as a rate instead of a snapshot, with four metrics and a scorecard.
What Is an XML Sitemap, and Does It Help SEO?
An XML sitemap is the page list you hand search engines. Here's what Google reads in it, what it ignores, whether a local business site needs one, and how to check yours in two minutes.
12 AI Visibility Tracking Tools for Agencies in 2026
Agencies don't need the tracker with the most engines. They need one a client can see under the agency's brand, at a price that still leaves a margin. Twelve tools, five axes, one table.
Where AI Gets Its Data About Your Local Business
Nearly 2 million logged citations show exactly where AI assistants pull local business facts from. The list is shorter than you'd guess, and you can claim every spot on it.
Do You Need a Google Business Profile for AI Visibility?
Every major assistant reads Google Business Profile data somewhere in its answers, even ChatGPT. Here's what your profile feeds them, and what to do if Google won't let you have one.
How to Speed Up Your Slow Website
Most slow sites are slow for the same few reasons, and images top the list. Here's how to speed up your website in order of impact, the biggest wins first, and how to hand the whole list to AI.
AggregateRating Schema for Local SEO
AggregateRating is the schema that puts your star rating in code machines can read. Here's how it works, the reason your own stars often won't show in Google search, and how to write one that holds up.
SEO vs. AEO and Why You Need Both
Ranking on Google and getting recommended by AI are two different games. Here's the difference between SEO and AEO, why you can win one and lose the other, and how to cover both.
Core Web Vitals in Plain English
Someone told you your site "fails Core Web Vitals" and it sounded like a foreign language. Here's what LCP, INP, and CLS actually mean, how to measure them in Chrome, and how to fix them with AI.
What Is Local Schema Markup, and How Do You Add It?
A few lines of code can tell Google and AI exactly what your business is, where it works, and when it's open, no guessing required. Here's how local schema markup works, and how to add it in one sitting.
What Is llms.txt, and Do You Need One?
More AI models read your site before they recommend anyone. An llms.txt file hands them a clean summary instead of your raw code. Here's what it is, whether you need one, and where it goes.
How to Get Your Business Recommended by AI
When a customer asks AI for a business like yours, only a few names come up. Here's how AI decides who to recommend, how to check where you stand, and what to fix to get named more often.
How to Check If AI Recommends Your Business
Your customers are asking AI for a business like yours. Here's a simple way to check whether the major assistants name you, read the answers like an auditor, and turn it into a habit.
How Reviews Shape AI Recommendations
The assistants that recommend businesses lean heavily on your reviews, how many, how recent, how good, and what they say. Here's how reviews feed AI recommendations, and how to make yours work harder.
How to Become an AI Visibility Agency
AI answers are where more of your clients get found or filtered out. For agencies, that's a new service line that extends the local SEO work you already do. Here's how to package, price, and report on it.
See where AI recommends you, and where it doesn't
Lighthouse Local tracks all five platforms, shows who's getting named instead of you, and turns every gap into a plain-English fix.