How AI assistants choose local businesses

AI assistants choose local businesses mostly from what search indexes and business listings already say about them: Google’s AI answers draw on Google Search and Business Profiles, Copilot on Bing, and ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity on their own search crawlers. The businesses that get named are the ones whose facts are easy to read, consistent everywhere, and backed by reviews and other sites.

There is no separate AI ranking you can buy or file for. That is good news for a small business in El Paso, Las Cruces or Juárez, because the work that gets you into an AI answer is the same work that gets you found on Google. Here is what each company says, in its own documentation, and what to do about it.

Google: AI Overviews, AI Mode and the local results

Google’s guidance for site owners is blunt. It says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations needed. It also says you do not need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in those features, and that the usual SEO fundamentals still apply.

For local searches, Google ranks Business Profiles on three things:

• Relevance: how well your profile matches what someone searched.
• Distance: how far you are from the person searching.
• Prominence: how well known the business is. Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help.

Google also says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. So when someone in the Upper Valley asks Google’s AI for a tire shop open on Sunday, the answer leans on the same signals: a complete profile with the right category and hours, a site that says what you do, and reviews.

One control matters here. Google-Extended lets you keep your content out of Gemini training and out of grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. Google states it does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search. To limit what appears in Search itself, Google points to nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex.

Bing and Copilot

Microsoft rewrote its Bing Webmaster Guidelines in early 2026 to cover how pages appear in Copilot’s answers as well as in regular results. As reported by Search Engine Journal on February 27, 2026, the guidelines say single-topic pages are more likely to be picked for grounding, with the key information near the top. They also describe two controls: NOARCHIVE keeps your content out of Copilot responses and grounding results, and NOCACHE limits Copilot to your URL, title and snippet.

IndexNow is the other piece. It lets a website tell participating search engines the moment a page changes, instead of waiting for a crawl. The IndexNow site lists Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep as participants. Google is not on that list.

ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity: the crawlers that matter

Each of these companies runs more than one crawler, and they do different jobs. This is where many small-business sites get it wrong: a robots.txt file copied from a forum that blocks “all AI bots” can also block the ones that put you in answers.

What their documentation says:

• OpenAI: OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT’s search features. Sites that opt out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. GPTBot is for training models.
• Anthropic: ClaudeBot collects content that may be used for training. Claude-SearchBot works to improve search results, and Anthropic says blocking it may reduce your site’s visibility and accuracy in search results. Its bots honor robots.txt.
• Perplexity: PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity’s search results and follows robots.txt. Perplexity-User fetches a page when a user asks about it, and Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt, because a person requested the visit.

The practical rule: you can block training crawlers if you would rather your content not train models, and still leave the search crawlers open. If you want to be recommended, do not block OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Bingbot or Googlebot.

What llms.txt is, and what it is not

llms.txt is a proposal, published by Jeremy Howard in September 2024, to put a Markdown file at the root of a site that summarizes it for language models. It is not a web standard. Google’s AI features guidance says you do not need new AI text files to appear in its AI features.

Adding one costs little and hurts nothing. Just do not pay anyone who sells it as the reason an assistant will start recommending you.

What makes an assistant name your business

Nobody outside these companies knows the exact formulas, and they change. What the documentation and the local ranking factors point to is plain, and it is mostly housekeeping.

Put the facts on your site as text

Your business name, address, phone, hours, service area, the services you offer and the languages you speak, written as text on the page. Not inside a photo, not only in a PDF menu. A crawler cannot quote what it cannot read.

Make every listing agree

Your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Facebook, Yelp and any directory should carry the same name, number, address and hours. When sources disagree, an assistant may pick the wrong one or skip you.

One page per service

Bing’s guidance favors single-topic pages for grounding. A page for brake repair and another for oil changes give an assistant a clear page to cite for each question. One long page covering everything gives it a muddle.

Earn reviews and mentions

Google ties prominence partly to reviews and ratings. Mentions in local news, the chamber’s directory or a supplier’s site also tell every system the business is real. Ask happy customers for reviews and answer the ones you get.

Write your Spanish pages in Spanish

When someone asks an assistant in Spanish for a dentist in El Paso, a page written in Spanish has the words to match. A translate widget usually renders text in the browser, which a crawler may never see.

Keep robots.txt and your site open to search

Check that robots.txt does not block the search crawlers in the table above, that pages load without a login, and that the important text is in the HTML instead of being built only by scripts after the page opens.

Tell search engines when something changes

Submit a sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and use IndexNow for the engines that support it.

What nobody can promise

No agency can guarantee that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot or Google will name your business. The answers change with the person asking, where they are, how they word the question and what the system found that day. What you can control is whether the facts about your business are clear, consistent and reachable when an assistant goes looking.

How Rodco Systems handles this

Every site we build puts your business facts in the HTML as plain text, ships with structured data, a sitemap and Search Console, and links to your Google Business Profile. Spanish pages are written in Spanish. For businesses that want more, our AI search optimization service works through the steps above: listings, robots.txt, page structure and reviews. We do it for clients in El Paso, Las Cruces and Ciudad Juárez, and we never promise a placement nobody controls.

Rodco Systems, El Paso, Texas.