Assistants do not invent local businesses. They repeat the ones the web already agrees on, and your Google listing is a large part of that agreement.
The short version
When someone asks an assistant who to hire nearby, it does not know your trade from memory. It searches, reads what comes back, and names businesses that appear more than once with details that agree.
Your Google Business Profile sits underneath a lot of what comes back. It feeds the map results, it is quoted by directories, and it carries the review count that makes you look like a safe recommendation or a risky one.
The map pack is the answer to your questions
Ask Google “best electrician near me” and you usually get three businesses on a map, not a written AI summary. For find-a-business questions, that box is Google’s answer.
Those three spots are worth watching, because they tell you who Google currently believes is the right call. If you are not there, the businesses that are will tell you what you are competing against on reviews, distance and category.
One thing to know: a listing in that box can be an advertisement rather than a ranking. A paid slot says a rival bought the place, not that they earned it.
What to fix, in order
- Claim it, if you have not. An unclaimed listing can still show up, with details nobody is maintaining.
- Make the details match your website exactly.Same business name, same phone number, same spelling. Not “and” in one place and “&” in the other.
- Pick the primary category a customer would say. Your primary category does most of the work. Secondary ones help less than people think.
- Ask for reviews, steadily. A slow steady flow reads better than thirty in one week, which reads as bought.
- Answer the reviews, including the bad ones. A calm reply to a complaint is read by every future customer and by anything summarising you.
- Add real photos. Your vans, your work, your team. Stock images are recognisable and they say nothing about you.
The part nobody tells you
Assistants match businesses by name, and your official name may not be the name your customers say. If everyone calls you by a short version, answers that use the short version may not be counted as being about you.
That is worth knowing rather than working around. If your registered name has no presence in AI answers, that is a real finding about your business, not a measurement error.
Common questions
Does my Google Business Profile affect ChatGPT?
Indirectly, and more than people expect. Assistants lean on sources that already rank, and your listing feeds the map results, the review counts and the directory pages those sources are built from.
How many reviews do I need?
There is no threshold anyone can honestly give you. What matters is being comparable to the businesses that get named for your questions. If they sit at two hundred and you sit at nine, that gap is the finding.
My business is not at the address customers search from. Does that hurt me?
It can. Map results rank partly on distance from the searcher, so a yard on the cheap edge of town looks further away than a rival in the centre. It is a real disadvantage and it is not your fault.
Should I add a category I do not really serve?
No. Categories you cannot deliver bring calls you have to turn down, and the mismatch between your listing and your site is itself a signal that you are hard to trust.