Hugo Pegley, blog

Does the business you're buying show up in AI answers?

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ask an AI tool for a plumber in your town and it names two or three businesses. The ones it names get the call. So when you are buying a local service business, it is fair to ask whether it is one of the names.

You can test this in about half an hour with no special tools.

The ten prompts

Replace the bracketed parts with the target’s trade, town and a couple of specifics.

Best [trade] in [town]
Who should I call for [common job] in [town]
[Trade] near [neighborhood]
How much does [common job] cost in [town], and who does it
Trusted [trade] in [town] with good reviews
[Trade] that handles [specialist job] in [county]
Emergency [trade] in [town]
Best [trade] for [homes, or small businesses] in [town]
Alternatives to [the biggest local competitor]
Is [the target’s name] any good

The first nine ask the way a customer would, without the name. The last one is the only branded prompt, and it tells you what the tools say when they are asked directly.

Where to run them

Run all ten in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, using either AI Overviews or AI Mode. Use a private window and sign out where you can, so earlier searches do not color the answers. Note that these tools vary by location, so set it to the town the business serves.

How to score it

For each prompt, give the target a score.

2 if it is named in the answer
1 if it is only listed as a source or link
0 if it does not appear

Alongside, write down which businesses are named instead. That list is often more useful than the score. It tells you who the target is actually competing with for these answers.

Run each prompt twice. Answers change from one run to the next, so a single result is a snapshot, not a verdict. Treat the total as directional. A target that scores nothing on nine of ten prompts is clearly missing. One that scores 12 out of 20 is doing well. The middle takes judgment.

What drives inclusion

These tools assemble their answers from the sources a search engine already reads. The businesses that appear tend to have a strong Google Business Profile, reviews with real content, the same name and address everywhere, and pages that answer the question plainly. I have covered the mechanism in how AI answers choose a local business, and what the page itself needs in what an AEO-ready service page looks like.

If the business does not show up

Do not read it as a reason to walk away. Most local businesses are absent, and the reasons are ordinary.

Check the Business Profile for the basics: category, services, hours, photos
Check the reviews for pace and content
Check that the name, address and phone number match across the web
Look at the website for a clear page per service and per town

If those are weak, the fix is usually a few weeks of ordinary work. If they are strong and the business still never appears, that is rarer and worth a closer look.

Making it a diligence line item

Quality of earnings and legal diligence cover what has happened. This covers an early signal of where leads may come from next. It will not set the price on its own, but it belongs in the same pile as the rest of the 30-minute screen, and it is cheap enough to run on every target you seriously consider.

For a fuller read, SEO diligence for searchers includes it alongside the other checks.

Branded vs. non-branded: how much is just its name?

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If most of a business’s search traffic is people typing its name, you are buying a phone number, not a marketing engine.

That sounds harsh, and it is not always a bad thing. But it changes what you are buying, and it is one of the easiest things to check before an LOI.

The two kinds of search

Branded searches include the business name. People who type it already know the company. They were referred, or used it before, or saw the truck. They are looking for the phone number, the hours or the website.

Non-branded searches are for the service. “Furnace repair near me”. “Tile cleaner in Mill Valley”. The person has a need and no particular company in mind. This is the traffic a marketing engine produces, and the traffic that does not depend on the owner being known.

How to find the split in three steps

Ask for Search Console access. Google Search Console records the searches that led to the site. The seller can add you as a user with read access without handing over control. If they will not, that is information too
Open the Performance report and set the range to the longest available. Search Console keeps about sixteen months
Filter the queries. Add a query filter, choose custom regex, and exclude the business name and its common spellings. What remains is the non-branded traffic. Then compare clicks for each

A few cautions. Google leaves out rare, anonymized queries, so the totals are a floor and not a precise count. And the business name will be spelled in ways you did not think of, so scan the top queries and adjust the filter.

If you cannot get access

You can still get a rough read. Tools such as Semrush estimate the keywords a site ranks for. They are estimates, not measurements, and weaker for small local sites, so treat them as a sanity check. Look at whether the top keywords all contain the company name.

What the split means

I do not have a ratio that counts as good. A trades business with a century of word of mouth will legitimately be mostly branded. What matters is what sits behind the number.

Mostly branded, steady: loyal repeat customers and referrals. A real asset, but growth has to come from somewhere else
Mostly branded, falling: the base is shrinking and nothing is replacing it
A meaningful non-branded share: the business is found by strangers, so the leads do not all travel with the owner
Non-branded concentrated in a few terms: one service is carrying it. Ask what happens if it stops

What happens when the owner leaves

This is the question underneath the whole check. Branded demand follows the brand. If the brand is the company, it should mostly survive a handover. If the brand is the owner, whose name is on the van and who answered every call, some of the branded searches may leave with them.

Non-branded demand does not care who owns the business. It is the part of the traffic you can most safely assume you are buying.

Where to go next

Put the split next to what you saw in the 30-minute screen, then ask the seller where they think their leads come from. Compare it to what the data says. When it is worth a full report, that is what my SEO diligence covers.

What an AEO-ready service page looks like

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When an AI tool answers “who fixes water heaters in Novato”, it reads pages and decides which ones it can quote. A page it can quote says plainly what the business does, where, and how to get in touch. A page it cannot quote makes the reader, human or otherwise, guess.

There is nothing exotic about a page built to be quoted. It is a good service page, done carefully. Here is what I look for, in the order I would check it.

1. The service and the city in the title and the H1

The title and the main heading should both say what the page is about and where. “Water heater repair in Novato” tells everyone at once. “Our services” tells no one anything.

One page per service, and where it makes sense one per area. A single page listing every service and every town cannot be about any of them.

2. A plain opening paragraph

The first paragraph should answer the question the page exists for: what you do, who for, where, and what happens next. Write it as though it will be quoted on its own, because it may be.

“We repair and replace tank and tankless water heaters across Novato, San Rafael and southern Marin. Most repairs are done the same day.”

Only write that if it is true. A claim that cannot be checked is worse than no claim.

3. Real questions with real answers

A short FAQ block is the most quotable part of any page, because it is already shaped as question and answer. Use the questions customers actually ask on the phone: how much does it cost, how long does it take, do you work weekends, what areas do you cover. Answer each in a sentence or two, with a figure or a range where you honestly can.

Put the text in the page itself. Content hidden behind a script that loads later is easier for a crawler to miss.

4. LocalBusiness structured data

Structured data is a block of code that states the facts about the business in a form a machine can read: its name, address, phone number, hours, the service area and the services.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Plumber",
  "name": "Example Plumbing",
  "telephone": "+1-415-555-0100",
  "areaServed": ["Novato", "San Rafael"]
}
</script>

I want to be straight about what it does. It does not guarantee anything, and I cannot promise an AI tool uses it. It removes ambiguity, and the visible text on the page is still what gets quoted. Treat it as a way of agreeing with yourself in two places.

5. One phone number, and a tap-to-call link

Most of these visitors are on a phone. A number that is plain text has to be copied. A number written as a link can be tapped.

<a href="tel:+14155550100">(415) 555-0100</a>

Use the same number everywhere, matching the one on the Business Profile. Why that consistency matters is covered in this piece on NAP.

6. Proof on the page

Reviews, years in business, a license number where one applies, photos of real work. These are the details that separate a business from a template, and they are the kind of fact an answer can attach to a recommendation.

7. A page that loads and reads on a phone

If it is slow, or the text is tiny, or a banner covers the number, the best copy in the world will not get used. Open your own page on your own phone and try to call.

What I usually see instead

The usual failures are the opposite of the list. A single services page with no city. Services presented as products in a cart. A phone number that is an image. No questions anywhere. None of it is hard to fix, and most of it is an afternoon’s work.

If you want to know how the answers get assembled in the first place, start with how AI tools choose a local business. The page is one part of the wider local SEO work.

Reviews slow down before revenue does

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Revenue lags. Reviews lead.

A review is the by-product of a finished job plus someone remembering to ask for it. So the pace at which reviews arrive is a rough running count of how many customers are being served and how well the process around them is working. It moves earlier than the books do, because the books only record a job once it has been invoiced and paid.

That makes it one of the cheapest forward-looking numbers you can get on a target, and one that almost nobody puts in a diligence checklist.

How to pull the timeline in five minutes

You do not need a tool.

Open the business’s Google profile and click through to the reviews
Sort by newest
Scroll back and jot down how many reviews landed in each of the last four quarters
Do the same for the year before that, as far as you can be bothered to go

Google shows ages as “3 months ago” and “a year ago”, so the dates are coarse. That is enough. You are looking for a shape, not a precise count. Review tools can export exact dates if you want them.

Then do the same for the two or three biggest competitors in the same town. A pace means nothing alone. It means something next to the businesses a customer would also be choosing between.

What to look for

I do not have a number that counts as healthy, and I would be suspicious of anyone who claimed one. It varies by trade, by market and by how many jobs a business does. What matters is the shape.

Steady: reviews arrive at a similar rate quarter after quarter. That usually means someone has a habit of asking
Rising: a recent push, or a new tech or office manager who cares. Find out who
Fell off a cliff: a clear change in the last six to twelve months. This is the one to ask about
Never really started: few reviews relative to the age of the business

The same number can mean opposite things

Take a heating and air company that has traded for nearly a century and has under eighty Google reviews. The count looks alarming. But if the pace has always been slow, the more likely story is that nobody ever asked. The customers are there and the asking is not. For a buyer that is upside, and one of the cheapest to capture.

A business with three hundred reviews that has had almost none since spring tells a different story, even though the total looks healthier. Something changed.

What a slowdown can mean

When the pace drops, the cause is usually one of these.

Owner fatigue. The person who used to ask every customer has stopped
A lost crew member. Often the technician customers liked, who also asked them
Fewer jobs. The honest and worst case: the business is simply doing less work
A process change. A new scheduling system stopped sending the review request
A profile problem. Reviews filtered or removed, or a profile that changed

Only one of those is a revenue problem, and you cannot tell which from the outside. That is the point. The slowdown does not give you an answer. It gives you a question to ask the seller while there is still time to price the answer.

How to use it

Treat it as a prompt, not a verdict. In my experience a drop in review pace is worth a conversation, and a steady or rising pace is a reassuring sign, but I would not price a deal on it alone.

Put it next to the other checks in the 30-minute screen, and ask the seller directly: who asks for reviews, how, and has that changed? The answer often tells you more about how the business runs than the review count does. If you want the whole picture of a target’s online footprint, that is what SEO diligence for searchers covers.

AEO for local service businesses

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

More people now ask an assistant instead of searching. “Who is a good electrician near me.” “Can anyone fix a water heater this week in Oakland.” The answer comes back as a few sentences naming two or three businesses.

For a local service business, getting into those sentences comes down to a short list of jobs. None of them is exotic.

1. Get the Google Business Profile right

It is the most important source for local questions. Choose the most specific primary category, list every service you actually offer, set your service area accurately, keep the hours current, and add real photos. If you are not sure what the profile is, this explains it.

2. Make every listing agree

Search your business name and look at what comes up: Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing, Facebook, industry directories. Check the name, address, phone number and website on each. Where they differ, fix them to match the profile. A model deciding whether to name you is comparing these sources against each other, and disagreement makes you a risky choice.

3. Write a page for each service you want to be asked about

If you do drain cleaning, water heater replacement and repiping, each deserves its own page. State in the first few lines what the service is, which towns you do it in, and what a customer can expect. Plain wording beats clever wording, because the model lifts sentences, and a clear sentence is the one that gets lifted.

Add a short list of the questions customers actually ask, with direct answers. Things like how long the job takes, whether you charge for the visit, and whether you need access to the property. These are the questions people put to assistants.

4. Ask for reviews that describe the job

A star rating puts you on the shortlist. The text of the reviews gives the assistant something to say about you. Ask soon after the work is done and mention what you did, and the review will tend to name the service and the town. Do not script it or offer anything in exchange, which breaks the platforms’ rules and shows in the writing.

5. Be mentioned somewhere other than your own site

Local press, the chamber of commerce, supplier and manufacturer directories, community sponsorships. Each is another independent source saying you exist and what you do in a specific place.

6. Check what the assistants say

Pick five to ten questions your customers would ask. Put them to ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode and Perplexity once a month, and write down who is named and what is said. It is manual and imprecise, but it is the only direct measurement there is. Note also any new customer who says an assistant sent them, and ask new callers how they found you.

What to expect

Slower and less certain than a ranking. The answers vary from one asking to the next, and the systems change, so I would not promise a result on any date. The work is the same foundation as ordinary local SEO, which is why it is worth doing even if the assistants change shape again.

For how the two approaches relate, see the difference between SEO and AEO.

Diligence lead flow in 30 minutes, before the LOI

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before you sign an LOI on a local service business, you can learn a surprising amount about where its leads come from without asking the seller a single question. It takes about thirty minutes, costs nothing, and uses only what is public.

None of this replaces proper diligence. It is a screen. Its job is to tell you whether the business deserves the deeper look, and which questions to put to the seller when you get one.

1. Google Business Profile health (5 minutes)

Search the business name and open its profile. You are looking for the basics done properly.

Is the primary category the one a customer would search for? A heating company listed as a general contractor is competing for the wrong searches
Are the hours real, and do they match the website?
Is the address shown, or is it a service area business with the address hidden? That setting often caps how well the profile can rank, and it can be changed
Are there recent photos, or is the newest one three years old?

What it means for the deal: a neglected profile on an otherwise good business is cheap upside. A profile with odd flags, a changed name or a suspension history is a risk worth asking about.

2. Map pack position (5 minutes)

Search the two or three things the business earns its money from, with the city. For example “water heater repair” and the town name. Note whether the business appears in the map pack, and where.

Do not do this from the business’s own office. Google knows where you are and favors nearby profiles, so the result flatters the business. Check from a couple of other parts of the area it serves, or use a rank-grid tool that does it for you.

What it means for the deal: if a business with a good reputation is missing from the pack for its core searches, find out why. It may be the profile, the address setup or the website. Each of those has a different price to fix.

3. Review count and velocity (10 minutes)

This one takes the longest because it is the most revealing. Open the reviews and sort by newest. Scroll back and note roughly how many arrived in the last three months, the three before that, and the year before. Look at whether the owner replies.

What it means for the deal: the pace tells you something the P&L does not yet. A slowdown in reviews often shows up before a slowdown in revenue. A business with few reviews for its age usually just never asked, which is an opportunity. A business whose reviews were steady and then stopped deserves a question.

4. Branded against non-branded demand (5 minutes)

Some customers find the business by typing its name. Others find it by searching for the service. Those are very different companies to buy. Without Search Console access you cannot measure the split, but you can get a rough sense by checking whether the business shows up for the service searches at all, or only for its own name.

What it means for the deal: if you only find it by searching its name, your leads are probably referrals and repeat customers. That is a real asset, but it is not a marketing engine. How to measure the split properly is worth doing once you have access.

5. Presence in AI answers (5 minutes)

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode for the best business of this kind in its town. Note whether the target is named, and who is named instead.

What it means for the deal: more buyers will ask a chatbot first each year. A business absent from those answers is not in trouble today, but it is exposed. The fuller test is in the next piece on this.

Reading the result

You are not scoring the business out of five. You are sorting what you found into three piles.

Strong and unforced: reputation and visibility are both good. Ask what the seller does that keeps it that way
Good business, weak footprint: the reputation is the asset and the gaps are fixable. This is the pile that makes the screen worth running
Weak on both: the business may be coasting on a past reputation. Slow down

Then take the questions this raised to the seller, and decide whether a full SEO diligence is worth commissioning before you commit.

What is the Google map pack, and how do you get into it?

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Search for “plumber” or “tile cleaner near me” and, above the ordinary results, Google shows a map with three businesses listed beneath it. That block is the map pack, sometimes called the local pack or the 3-pack. Each entry shows the business name, rating, review count, hours and buttons to call or get directions.

For a local service business it is often the most valuable space on the page. People call straight from it, frequently without opening a website.

Where the businesses come from

The map pack is built from Google Business Profiles. A business that has no profile cannot appear in it, whatever its website looks like. If you are not sure what a profile is, this explains it.

How Google decides who appears

Google says local results are based mainly on three things: relevance, distance and prominence.

Relevance is how well your profile matches what was searched. The primary category, the services you list, your description and the content of your website all feed into it. A profile categorised as a general contractor is a weaker match for “bathroom remodel” than one that lists it as a service and says so on the website.

Distance is how far you are from the searcher, or from the area named in the search. You cannot change where you are. It does mean that a business across town can rank well in its own neighbourhood and poorly in yours, and that two people searching the same words from different streets can see different packs.

Prominence is how well known and well regarded you appear to be. Reviews, their number, their recency and their content count, as do mentions of the business elsewhere on the web and the strength of your website.

Google does not publish the weighting, and nobody outside it knows it exactly.

What you can influence

Relevance and prominence are the levers.

Pick the most specific primary category and add the others that honestly apply
List each service with a short description
Keep name, address, phone and hours accurate, and the same everywhere (why that matters)
Earn reviews steadily, and reply to them
Have a website with a clear page for each service and each area you serve
Add real photos regularly

None of it is quick, but most of it is within your control.

Why you can’t see “your ranking”

Because distance matters, there is no single ranking. Searching from your office is a poor test, since Google knows where you are and favours you. A better test is to check from several points across the area you want to serve, and to track how often you appear over time rather than at one moment.

A realistic expectation

You will not win every search in every town. A business is strongest near where it is and for what it clearly does. The aim is to be reliably in the pack for your main services across the places you actually want work.

That is the core of local SEO: the profile, the listings, the reviews and the website, working together.

NAP consistency and local citations

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

NAP stands for name, address and phone number. A citation is any mention of those details on another website: a directory, a review site, a map service, a chamber of commerce page. NAP consistency means those details are the same everywhere your business is listed.

It is unglamorous work, and it is the foundation the rest of local SEO sits on.

Why it matters

Google builds its picture of your business from many sources, not only your profile. When the sources agree, it can be confident the business is real and where it is. When they disagree, it has to guess, and a business that is hard to be sure about is a weaker candidate for the map pack.

The same is true of AI assistants. A model describing your business is reading those same sources, and mismatches are a common reason a good business is left out of an answer. I cover that in how ChatGPT decides which local business to recommend.

What inconsistency looks like

“Smith & Sons Plumbing” in one place, “Smith and Sons Plumbing Inc.” in another
“Suite 4” on the website, “Ste. 4” on Yelp, no suite on Apple Maps
A phone number from before you changed provider
An old address on a directory that scraped your details years ago
A tracking number on some listings and the main line on others

Small differences in abbreviation rarely cause harm. Different phone numbers, different addresses, or a business name that has changed are the ones to fix.

How much it counts today

Less than it did when directory lists were a main part of SEO, and still more than most people assume. It is not a tactic that moves you up on its own. It is closer to a precondition: it stops you losing ground, and it makes the other work count.

How to check it

Decide the correct version of your name, address, phone and website, and write it down. Use your Google Business Profile as the reference.
Search your business name, your phone number and your address, and note every listing that comes up.
Check the main ones directly: Google, Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp, Facebook, and the directories that matter in your trade.
Record each mismatch against the reference.

How to fix it

Claim or sign in to each listing and correct it. Where you cannot, most directories have a form to request a change. Some data comes from aggregators that feed many sites, so a correction can take weeks to spread.

Start with the highest-traffic listings, and do the wrong phone numbers and addresses first. Do not pay for a service that promises hundreds of submissions. Quantity is not the goal, and low-quality directories add little.

Building citations that help

Beyond fixing errors, a few new listings are worth having: the chamber of commerce, trade associations, supplier directories and local press. Each is an independent source confirming that you exist in a particular place, which is the point of a citation.

Make the website agree

Put your name, address and phone in the footer or on the contact page as text, exactly as they appear on the profile. Then every source, including your own site, tells the same story.

Tidying citations is a regular part of the local SEO work I do. It pairs with the profile work in what is the Google map pack.

The difference between SEO and AEO

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

SEO is the work of getting a page to show up when someone searches. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the work of getting your business named when someone asks a question and gets a written answer back instead of a list of links.

The two share most of their raw material. The difference is in what the person sees at the end, and that changes what you are aiming at.

What each one is aiming at

With SEO, the goal is a position. You are one of ten blue links, or one of three businesses on the map, and the searcher chooses between you. Ranking higher means more of them choose you.

With AEO, the goal is a mention. ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode and Perplexity write a short answer and name a few sources or businesses inside it. There is no page two. You are in the answer or you are not, and the person usually acts on what they were told without opening ten tabs.

Where they overlap

Most of the work is shared:

A site that is fast, crawlable and says plainly what you do
Pages that match what people actually search for
A Google Business Profile that is complete and accurate, for local businesses
Reviews with real content in them
The same name, address and description everywhere you are listed
Mentions of your business on other credible sites

If you have done good SEO, you have done most of the groundwork for AEO. The assistants read the same web that Google does, and several of them lean on Google’s or Bing’s results directly.

Where they differ

Rankings become a sample, not a number. You can check where you rank for a keyword and get the same answer all day. An AI answer is written fresh each time, so the same question can name different businesses on different days. Measuring it means asking the same questions repeatedly and looking at how often you appear.

The page needs sentences a model can lift. For a ranking, a page can be organised around a keyword and still work. For an answer, the page needs to state the thing directly: what you do, who it is for, where, and what to expect. A model summarising your site will use whatever sentence says it most clearly. If none does, it will use someone else’s.

Consistency counts for more. A search engine can shrug off a mismatched phone number on one directory. A model assembling a sentence about your business has to decide which source is right, and when they disagree it often leaves you out for a business whose sources agree.

Clicks are not the only outcome. Some AI answers send a visitor to your site, and some simply tell the person to call you. The second shows up as a phone call or a form submission, not as a session in analytics.

What does not change

Fundamentals still matter, and nobody outside the companies running these systems knows how the weighting works. Anyone offering a secret formula for AEO is guessing. I treat it as an extension of SEO rather than a separate discipline: the same foundations, with more attention to clarity and to whether your sources agree with each other.

I go into how this plays out for local businesses in how ChatGPT decides which local business to recommend, and the practical steps are in AEO for local service businesses.

Should you pay for AEO separately?

Usually not. If your SEO is in good shape, the additions are small: tighten the pages that describe your services, clean up inconsistent listings, and check the assistants monthly to see what they say about you. If your SEO is not in good shape, fix that first, because that is where most of the AEO result comes from too.

That is how I run it for local businesses and for software companies: one engagement, one set of measurements, with the AI answers checked alongside rankings and leads.

What is a Google Business Profile?

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A Google Business Profile is the free listing Google keeps for a business. It is the box with your name, phone number, hours, reviews and photos that appears on the right of the results, or at the top on a phone, when someone searches for you. It is also what puts you on Google Maps.

It used to be called Google My Business. The name changed, the thing did not.

Why it matters

For anyone searching for a service nearby, the profile is often the first thing they see and the thing they act on. They call from it, get directions from it, and read the reviews on it, sometimes without visiting your website at all.

It is also the main source for the “map pack”, the three businesses shown above the ordinary results for a local search. And AI assistants answering local questions draw on the same data. I cover that in how ChatGPT decides which local business to recommend.

Who can have one

Businesses that deal with customers in person, either at a location or by travelling to them. A shop, a restaurant, a dentist, a plumber who visits homes. Google calls the second kind a service area business. Those hide their street address and list the areas they serve instead.

Businesses that exist only online, with no in-person contact, are generally not eligible.

What goes in it

Name. Your real, everyday business name, with nothing added to it. Stuffing keywords into the name is against the guidelines and can get a profile suspended.
Primary category. The single most specific description of what you do. This is one of the stronger signals Google uses to decide which searches you appear for.
Additional categories. Others that genuinely apply.
Address or service area. Whichever matches how you work.
Phone and website. The same ones you use everywhere else.
Hours. Kept current, including holidays.
Services. Each thing you offer, described in a sentence.
Photos. Real ones of your work, your premises, your team.
Description. A plain paragraph on what you do and where.

How you get one

Search for your business on Google Maps first, in case a listing already exists. If it does, you claim it. If not, you create one. Google then asks you to verify that the business is real, usually by video, phone, email or postcard depending on the case. Verify it yourself, from an account you control, so the profile does not end up owned by a former employee or an agency you stop working with.

Keeping it working

Once it is set up, three habits do most of the work. Answer every review, good or bad, briefly and politely. Add photos now and then. And check that the details still match your website and other listings, because inconsistencies are one of the most common reasons a good business underperforms.

A profile is not a one-off task, but it is not a daily one either. An hour a month is usually enough.

Profile management is part of the local SEO work I do, alongside the website and the other listings.

The cheapest ranking lever in a service business acquisition

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve worked with many local service acquirers on their SEO and Google Business Profiles, and I run a few local businesses myself. There’s no guaranteed overnight trick to reaching top 3 in the Map Pack, but I wanted to share one relatively easy lever with high impact that I keep seeing underutilized when acquiring established businesses.

Take for example a 50-year-old home services company: well known locally, a few dozen reviews, 4.8 rating. They run out of a warehouse and operate in people’s homes, and don’t have a physical office.

When they set up their Google Business Profile years ago, they were asked: Do you have a physical location or do you run a service-area business?

They said SAB, so Google never asked for nor verified a public address. They only ask you for the cities and counties you serve. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it essentially tells Google “I serve this general area” instead of planting a flag on the ground in your core market. Google will have you input your home/warehouse address privately, hide it, and ask which cities and counties you serve. You can see this on the Google Map - a lightly shaded map area will appear on a SAB listing across all the counties and cities you selected, instead of a location pin for a physical location business.

Here’s the truth: it is extremely hard to rank well in the Google Map Pack as a SAB - businesses with physical addresses close to the querying user get huge preference. And Google Map Pack leads are the best potential channel for most service businesses.

Because of this, I’ve seen acquired SAB listings go from zero/low visibility in the Google Map Pack, with few leads to show for it, to strong positions in their core service area with great organic lead flow, just by verifying an office through Google. I’ve shared a before & after below of a real example in the wild from a client of mine of this change.

Local FalconSouthern Marin, before and after the profile moved to a verified address

To pass inspection with Google, it has to be a real office, staffed during posted hours and open to customers (an office manager or you working from it counts). Warehouses and virtual offices don’t qualify, and Google’s verification is rigorous when you submit the change.

But when possible, switching to a physical-location listing can make sense: the address shows on the map and will boost your rankings, and is a relatively straight-forward, high ROI change to make.

TLDR: Making a $500-600/mo investment in a small, but real, office to convert from a SAB to a physical location listing can have huge ROI for established businesses that already have many of the other trust and ranking signals Google wants. What to do:

During diligence, confirm the Google Business Profile set up.
If it’s a SAB, check current rankings using a map pack scanning tool to see if it’s struggling to rank highly despite good reviews and history.
Estimate market competitiveness to determine organic lead upside with a new physical office.
Find an affordable physical office, rent it, and staff it yourself or with your admin/office manager.
Submit the change to Google, pass inspection, and you’re good to go!

How ChatGPT decides which local business to recommend

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ask ChatGPT, or Google’s AI Mode, or Perplexity, “who is a good carpet cleaner in Mill Valley” and you get a short answer naming two or three businesses, with a sentence on each about why. No list of ten links. No map. A recommendation, in prose, that most people will take.

Where do those names come from? That is the question behind “answer engine optimisation”, or AEO, and the honest answer is more ordinary than the term suggests.

The answer is assembled, not ranked

A language model does not have a ranked index of plumbers. When it is asked a local question, it goes and looks: it runs searches, reads the results, reads listings and review sites and the businesses’ own pages, and then writes a summary of what it found. The businesses that appear are the ones that were easy to find, easy to describe, and consistently described across the sources it read.

That means the inputs are mostly the same inputs that decide the Google map pack. A strong Business Profile, reviews with real content, one consistent name and address everywhere, and a website that says plainly what the business does and where. The weighting is different and nobody outside these companies knows it precisely, but the raw material is the same.

What the model is reading

In practice, for a local service question, the sources that show up again and again are:

The Google Business Profile, or the Maps data derived from it: category, address, hours, rating, review count
Yelp, and to a lesser degree the other directories, because they have a page for nearly every business and the pages are structured
The business’s own website, in particular whichever page describes the service asked about
Review text, not just the star rating, because the model is looking for something to say about each business
Local press, chamber of commerce listings, and anything else that mentions the business by name in context

A business that is thin or contradictory across those is a bad candidate for a confident answer, and the model will pick a different one.

Consistency is most of the game

The most common reason a good business is missing from an AI answer is not that it lacks authority. It is that the sources disagree with each other. Three versions of the name. An old phone number on Yelp. A category on the profile that does not match what the website says. A service area that is listed differently in three places.

A model trying to say “Burrous Brothers is a carpet and rug cleaner in Mill Valley with strong reviews” needs every source it reads to agree with that sentence. The citation clean-up that local SEO has always required is, it turns out, the foundation of showing up in AI answers too.

Reviews as text

Star ratings get a business onto a shortlist. Review content gets it recommended. The model is reading the reviews to find something to say, so “great service” a hundred times is less useful than twenty reviews that mention the actual service, the town, and what happened.

You cannot write your customers’ reviews, and you should not try. But the way you ask shapes what comes back. Asking right after the job, with a mention of what was done, gets reviews that describe the work. That is good for the customer reading them, and it is what the model is looking for.

Pages that answer the question

The website’s role changes a little here. For the map pack, the site mostly needs to match the profile. For AI answers, it also needs to contain sentences that a model can lift. A page that says, in plain words, what you do, where you do it, who it is for, and what to expect, gives the model its summary ready-made. A page that is a wall of “premium solutions” gives it nothing.

This is the one place where AEO asks for something that older SEO advice did not: write the page as if answering the question a person would actually ask, in the order they would ask it.

For software companies the same logic holds at a different scale. The model is looking for a clear claim about what category the product is in and what job it does. That is the same problem B2B SaaS SEO has always been about, and the sites that struggle in search for lack of a clear claim struggle in AI answers for the same reason.

What I do not know

The weighting. Nobody outside OpenAI, Google and Perplexity knows how much a review counts against a citation against a page, and anyone selling you a specific formula is guessing. The systems also change quickly.

What I do know is that the work that helps is the same work that helps in the map pack, done with slightly more attention to whether the sources say the same thing and whether the pages contain plain sentences. So I do not sell AEO as a separate engagement. It is part of local SEO, measured the same way, with one addition.

Measuring it

Once a month, I ask the assistants the questions your customers ask. “Who is a good tile cleaner in Marin.” “Emergency plumber in the Sunset.” Five to ten questions, the same ones each month, and I record who is named and what is said about them. It is manual and it is imprecise, but it is the only direct measurement available, and over six months it shows movement.

Alongside that, leads. If the phone rings and the caller says “ChatGPT recommended you”, that goes in the count, and it has started happening.

If you are weighing up who to hire for any of this, this piece is the checklist I would use.

How to pick a Bay Area SEO consultant

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Bay Area has more people selling SEO per square mile than almost anywhere. Agencies in the city, freelancers in every county, offshore teams with a local phone number, and a growing number of tools that promise to do the whole thing for you. The labels tell you very little. “Consultant”, “agency”, “expert” and “strategist” are all self-awarded.

I am one of the people selling it, so read this with that in mind. But most of what follows is the advice I give to business owners who end up hiring someone else, and it holds regardless of who you pick.

Decide what you are buying

Before you talk to anyone, write down the number you want to move. Not “rank higher” or “more traffic”, which are means, but the thing you would actually notice: more calls from homeowners in Marin, more demo requests from operations managers, more orders from the Peninsula.

This matters because SEO is not one discipline. Getting a plumber into the map pack across San Francisco is local SEO, and it is mostly work on a Google Business Profile, reviews and a handful of pages. Getting a software company found for a category it has not named yet is B2B SaaS SEO, and it is mostly structural and editorial. Someone who is good at one is not automatically good at the other, and a proposal that does not tell you which one it is describing is a proposal for a generic service.

Ask how they will measure it

The most useful question in the first conversation is: what will you report, and where will the number come from?

A good answer names a data source. Leads from the website, counted in your CRM or your call tracking. Sessions from Search Console. Map pack position from a geo-grid scan across the actual service area rather than from the office. The source should be one you can open yourself, at any time, without asking.

A weak answer is a ranking report. Positions for a list of keywords are easy to produce and easy to make look good, and they say very little about whether anyone is calling. I count leads and I say so up front, because it is the number a business owner can check against the bank account.

Ask what they will not do

Anyone honest about the work has a list of things they refuse to do, and will volunteer it. Mine includes writing or buying reviews, which violates Google’s policies and gets profiles suspended; creating pages for neighbourhoods a business has no presence in; and promising a position for any term, which nobody can honestly offer.

If the answer to “what will you not do” is a blank look, or “whatever it takes”, be careful. The tactics that get a business penalised are almost always the ones someone did because a client asked.

Ask who does the work

Most agencies, including good ones, sell you a senior person and deliver a junior one. The person on the sales call writes the proposal, and an account manager runs the engagement with a team you never meet. That is not a scandal, it is how agencies scale, but you should know it before you sign, because the quality of the work is the quality of the person actually doing it.

Ask directly: who will be in the Google Business Profile? Who will write the tickets for my developer? Who do I email when something breaks? If those are three different people and you have met none of them, factor that in.

Ask them to look before they quote

A consultant who quotes a price before seeing your Search Console data is quoting for an average business, and yours is not average. I ask for read access to Search Console and analytics before the first proper conversation, and I spend the call walking through what I found. It takes forty minutes, and by the end it is clear to you and to me whether there is a fit.

If someone is willing to scope an engagement without looking at anything, the scope was written before they met you.

Does it matter that they are local?

For local SEO, yes, more than people expect. A consultant who knows that Mill Valley and San Rafael are different markets, that a Peninsula business competes with San Jose and a Marin business does not, and that the map pack in the city behaves differently from the map pack in a suburb with one main road, will make better decisions faster. Geography is the whole game in local search, and knowing the geography from having lived in it is worth something.

For SaaS and e-commerce, it matters much less. The work is structural and the market is national. Hire for the category experience and work with them from wherever they are.

The three things that predict success

Having watched engagements succeed and fail, the outcome is usually decided before the work starts, by three things.

You can name the number. Businesses that know what they want to move get it moved. Businesses that want to “do SEO” spend a year and cannot say what changed.

Someone will ship the changes. A consultant produces recommendations, tickets and content direction. If there is no developer, no writer and no one with the Business Profile login, nothing happens. Settle who does what before you start.

The scope is written down. What the consultant runs, what your team runs, what is reported and from where. Most disputes I have seen were about something that was never put in writing at the start.

If those three are in place, most competent consultants will do well by you. If they are not, the best consultant in the Bay Area will struggle.

What a good outcome looks like

A fifty-year-old carpet and rug cleaning business in Mill Valley changed hands in early 2026. The new owner inherited a website nobody had touched in a decade and a Business Profile ranking outside the top twenty for the services it actually sold. Within months of the work, the profile was first or second across most of southern Marin, and the client reported lead volume up 110 percent. The full write-up is here.

That engagement had all three things: a number, an owner who shipped, and a scope in writing. That is not a coincidence.

If you are weighing this up for your own business, start with a call. It is free, it is a working session, and if I am not the right person I will say so and point you at someone who is.