How to Get Your Business Recommended by AI Assistants
As customers increasingly ask AI assistants what to buy and where to go, being recommended by AI is becoming as important as ranking on Google — and the businesses that prepare now will own an unfair advantage.
A growing share of buying journeys no longer starts with a search box and a list of blue links. It starts with a question to an AI assistant: 'what's the best accountant near me?', 'which tool should I use for this?'. When the answer comes back as a short, confident recommendation, being on that shortlist is the whole game — and it is a different game from traditional SEO.
Why AI recommendations are different
A search engine hands you ten options and lets you choose. An AI assistant often hands you one, two or three, already filtered. That compression is brutal: there is no page two, and no reward for coming eleventh. The upside is that the criteria an AI uses to choose are, for now, winnable by businesses willing to do the basics well.
What AI assistants actually reward
AI models build their recommendations from what the wider web consistently says about you. That means clarity and consistency matter enormously: a clear description of exactly what you do and for whom, consistent business details across directories, and genuine third-party mentions — reviews, press, listings — that corroborate your claims. An AI is far likelier to recommend a business the web agrees on than one it has to guess about.
Structured, question-shaped content helps too. Pages that plainly answer the questions real customers ask — in the words they actually use — give AI systems clean, quotable material to draw on. This is why clear FAQs, specific service pages and honest comparisons increasingly outperform vague, keyword-stuffed marketing copy.
What to do now
Start by auditing what the internet currently says about you. Ask a few AI assistants what they would recommend for your category and location, and see whether you appear and how you are described. The gaps in that answer are your to-do list: missing listings, inconsistent details, thin content, too few reviews.
Then fix the fundamentals. Tighten your description of what you do, standardise your details everywhere they appear, earn more genuine reviews, and publish clear, specific answers to the questions your customers ask. None of this is exotic — it is good, honest marketing hygiene. But done consistently, it is how you become the business the machines recommend.
Quick FAQ
What is AI search or GEO?
It is the practice of making your business likely to appear in answers from AI assistants like ChatGPT — sometimes called generative engine optimisation — rather than only ranking in traditional search results.
How do AI assistants decide what to recommend?
They draw on what the wider web consistently says about a business: clear descriptions, consistent details across listings, genuine reviews and third-party mentions that corroborate your claims.
What's the first step for a small business?
Ask a few AI assistants what they'd recommend in your category and area, see if and how you appear, and fix the gaps — listings, consistency, reviews and clear content.
Search used to give customers ten choices; AI increasingly gives them one or two. That makes being recommended more valuable than ever — and, right now, surprisingly winnable. The businesses sorting out their basics today will be the ones the machines recommend tomorrow. — Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing
AI compresses choice to a shortlist of one or two — get your descriptions, listings, reviews and clear content in order now, while being recommended is still winnable.
Have you ever asked an AI assistant what it would recommend in your category — and did your business show up?
If you would like to know more about this topic, please contact us on danieln@merxmarketing.co.uk
Sources: Marketing Minute analysis of AI search and discovery trends.
Related reading
Written by Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing Ltd and Marketing Minute
