Ask someone how they found a plumber, an accountant or a decent lunch spot last year and the answer was probably Google. Ask the same question now and a growing number of people will tell you they asked an AI assistant instead. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s own AI answers have quietly changed how customers look for local businesses, and plenty of owners in Mitcham, Morden and Wimbledon have no idea whether they are part of the answer or missing from it entirely.
When someone asks an AI tool for the best blind fitter near Wimbledon or a reliable accountant in Morden, they rarely get ten blue links to scroll through. They get a short, confident recommendation, often naming just two or three businesses. If yours is not one of them, you have lost that customer before they ever reached your website, and unlike a search result you can scroll straight past, an AI answer feels like advice, so people tend to act on it.
How AI decides who to recommend
So how does an AI tool decide who to mention? It leans on the same signals that have always shaped local visibility, then interprets them in its own way. It reads your website, your reviews and the way other sites talk about you. Google’s AI Overviews pull together information from across the web into a single summary, and the clearer and more consistent your online presence, the easier you are to lift into that summary. The basics still carry weight, and if your profile could use some attention, optimising your Google Business Profile is a sensible place to start.
Why being understood beats ranking
The harder part is that AI tools do not simply rank pages, they try to understand them. They favour businesses whose websites answer real questions clearly, whose details line up across every platform, and whose content is written in a way a machine can interpret without guessing. That is a different discipline from traditional SEO, and it is where a lot of small businesses quietly stall.
This newer practice moves quickly, with the way AI tools choose and present businesses being rewritten from one update to the next. That is hard to keep up with while running a business, so it helps to lean on specialists such as Artemis Marketing, who follow these shifts, watch how the tools behave, and understand that being picked up by AI tools rarely comes down to how well a page ranks. It is whether your content is clear and well structured enough for an AI to understand what you do, and consistent enough for it to be treated as trustworthy. A business whose information reads as muddled or contradictory gets left out of the answer.
A few simple steps to start
If you would rather make a start on your own, a few practical moves make a real difference. Keep your business name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear online, because mismatched details make an AI tool less confident about putting you forward. Fill your website with the actual questions customers ask, answered plainly, instead of vague copy about being passionate and dynamic.
It also helps to add structured data to your site, a standardised format that tells search engines and AI tools exactly what your business does, where it is based and what it offers. Most website platforms support it, and it strips away a lot of the guesswork for the machines doing the recommending.
Make your reviews work harder
Reviews deserve a mention too. AI tools read them for far more than the star rating, picking up on the actual words customers use. A steady flow of genuine, detailed reviews gives the tools real language to draw on when they describe you, so encourage happy customers to describe what they valued, rather than leaving a bare five stars.
None of this happens overnight, and the businesses that start now, tidying up their information and writing for the questions people genuinely ask, are the ones most likely to be named when a potential customer turns to an AI tool for a recommendation. The rest risk staying invisible at the exact moment someone is ready to buy.
The Merton Chamber of Commerce supports local businesses in planning for changes like these. To join a community focused on practical business improvement, consider coming along to one of our networking events.
Do you have a topic worth sharing with fellow members, but you’re not sure how to shape the message? I’d be happy for you to contact me (Chloe Miller), to discuss how I can help sharpen your content and connect with the local business community.
[Image source: Depositphotos]