How to Rank on ChatGPT and Google: Local SEO in the AI Era
I hear a version of this every month from local service business owners.
"Sean, I have 20 years of experience. This new guy came around the corner, and now he's ranking number one above me. I don't understand."
So we pull up both websites. The new guy has more Google reviews. He has testimonials on his site. He posts a blog every week about the exact thing people are searching for.
The 20-year expert has none of that. He has all of it in his head and in his customers' memories, and none of it anywhere a search engine can see.
That is the whole game, and it just got bigger. Now you are not only proving yourself to Google. You are proving yourself to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing, and every other AI model your customers are asking for a recommendation.
SEO is not a hack. It is being clear and proving it.
If you take one thing out of this article, take this.
SEO is nothing more than being clear with Google and proving it.
You are not trying to trick an algorithm. Google's job, and ChatGPT's job, is to hand the person searching the best possible answer. Your job is to take the experience, knowledge, and results you already have in the real world and translate them into a format those systems can read and categorize.
Which means if you are not actually good in the real world, there is a ceiling on all of this. There are gray hat tactics that buy you a bump for a little while. Good still rises.
It also means the opposite is true. If you are genuinely the best in your market and you are losing to someone who isn't, you do not have an expertise problem. You have a translation problem.
The five pillars, and why most owners only pay for one
We look at SEO as five pillars that have to work together:
Technical SEO. The structure under the hood so search engines can crawl and understand your site.
User experience. People land on your page, they don't bounce, and they take action.
Authority. Links and mentions from other sites, which is really just a digital referral.
Content. New pages and posts that prove what you know.
Local. Your Google Business Profile, your map presence, your reviews.
It is the same idea as being healthy. Sleep, food, training, and recovery all have to be there. You can't out-train a garbage diet, and you can't out-blog a broken website.
The SEO you buy once versus the SEO that moves the needle
This is where most local service business owners are quietly getting hosed, and I say that as someone who got hosed by agencies before I ever built one.
Marketers are good at marketing. So a retainer proposal shows up with keyword tracking, technical audits, competitor analysis, monthly reporting, title tag and meta description updates. It reads like 50 things.
Here is what nobody tells you. Most of that is setup work. It gets done once and then monitored with small tweaks. Nobody is in your site every day rewriting title tags.
Think of it like a garage gym. Buying the rack, the bar, and the plates is real work and you need it. Owning a garage gym has never once put anybody in shape.
The parts that actually move your rankings every month are the parts that look like reps:
Content. New pages and posts on your website. My opinion is weekly. Google wants to see you consistently adding information.
Google Business Profile posts. Content going to your GBP monthly at a minimum.
Links and brand mentions. Other sites pointing at you and talking about you.
The volume matters the same way it does in the gym. Working out one day a week and working out seven days a week are not the same program, and paying for one blog a quarter and paying for four pages a month are not the same SEO.
Why nobody can promise you number one in 30 days
We had a garage door company in Indiana go from a brand new website to number one almost immediately. I told them exactly why on our call: there were no other garage door companies in their city. We did some optimization work, and they started ranking for the surrounding suburbs. It was not magic.
Now flip it. Say you haven't trained in 10 years and you sign up for a 5K. If everybody else in the race is running in a cast, you barely have to try. If everybody else is an ultramarathoner with their training, nutrition, and recovery dialed in, it does not matter how motivated you are on race day.
Your SEO timeline is set by three things: how competitive your market is, what your competition keeps doing, and how far behind you are starting. That is why competitor analysis comes first. It tells you what you have to do to catch up, and then what you have to keep doing to stay there.
SEO works. When it works is a competition question, not a belief question.
How ChatGPT actually finds a local business
Here is the part most owners have never had explained to them.
With Google, your site has already been crawled and indexed. You submit your sitemap through Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, and those engines have a working picture of what your business does.
Large language models work differently. They get trained on a snapshot of information, and right now that retraining looks like it happens roughly annually. A garage door company in Muncie, Indiana is probably not making the cut for a training model.
So when someone asks ChatGPT for a garage door repair company in their town and the model does not know, it goes into retrieval mode. That is the "Thinking" you see. It goes out and searches the live web, similar to what Google or Bing would do, and it assembles an answer from what it finds.
Which means two things. You still need genuinely good SEO, because that is what makes you findable at all. And you need to understand the specific signals these models weigh, because they are not the same ones Google weighs.
The two signals AI models are actually using right now
1. Third-party reviews, and not the ones you think
Google reviews carry enormous weight inside Google. They do not carry the same weight everywhere else.
ChatGPT, Bing, Grok, and Perplexity are not citing your Google Business Profile the way you would expect. Run a search on Bing or Yahoo sometime and watch what review source it pulls. It is usually Yelp.
Now here is the opportunity. Your competition has almost certainly done nothing on Yelp.
We have looked through very competitive markets and industries where the top businesses have hundreds or thousands of Google reviews. On Yelp, the leader in most of those industries is sitting under 10 reviews. You'll find the occasional plumber with 100-plus. Mostly it is a ghost town.
Same story with Trustpilot. These platforms carry weight with AI models for a simple reason: anybody can throw fake testimonials on their own website, but leaving a review on Yelp or Trustpilot requires an account on their platform. That is harder to fake, so it counts for more.
Build out your Yelp profile. Build out Trustpilot. Start asking for reviews there on purpose. You will be years ahead of your market for the cost of adding one line to your follow-up process.
2. Brand mentions
In traditional SEO we talk about backlinks, which is just another website pointing back to yours. I explain it as a digital referral. It doesn't matter how good you say you are. It matters that somebody else is saying it.
AI models care about something slightly different. They are not necessarily crawling the whole internet to verify every link. They are looking at how often your brand name comes up, and the sentiment of how people talk about it, across places like Reddit, blog articles, news sites, and directories.
That is why digital PR is part of what we run for our SEO clients. Press articles that name your brand give these models something to find when they go looking for you. If the article links back to your site too, you pick up the backlink as well. That is the double win, but the mention itself is doing work even without the link.
Can you just use AI to do your SEO?
Partly. Let me be honest about where it breaks.
AI is the world's greatest yes-man employee. Ask it for anything and you get "Great suggestion, absolutely," and an answer that makes you feel like the smartest person in the room.
These models are very good at producing output. They are missing context. Ask ChatGPT for title tags and meta descriptions and it will write them. Without knowing which keywords you are chasing, what your competitors already rank for, and what is currently on your site, it is guessing. Better than someone who knows no SEO at all. Nowhere near the level you need if you actually want to win your market.
Same as asking it for a tax strategy. You will get a tax strategy. It will not be the one a CPA who knows your books and this year's rules would give you.
We use it constantly at the agency, and the reason it works for us is the inputs. Before we ask for anything we feed it keyword ranking reports, competitor analysis, current performance data, brand guidelines, and the client's own documented processes. In ChatGPT, you can set custom instructions on your account and then build a project per client with its own context and history.
Most people get about 70% of the way there with AI. That is genuinely useful. But it is the last 30% that separates you from your competition. With enough context loaded in, we get to 90 or 95%, and then a human reviews it and finishes it.
The takeaway is not "use AI." It is that the quality of what comes out is set by the quality of what you put in, and by whether somebody with real expertise is checking the work.
Your action step this month
Pick one. Do it before you read another article about AI search.
Go claim and fully build out your Yelp profile, and ask your next five happy customers to leave a review there.
Add one piece of content to your website this week. Answer a question a customer actually asked you.
Get one press article published that names your business.
The businesses that show up in ChatGPT next year are the ones doing this now, while their competition is still arguing about whether AI search matters.
Go deeper on this episode
I unpacked all of this with Brad on the Digital Slice podcast. Watch the full episode here, or watch it right on this page:
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If you want the checklist version, I put together the Marketing Domination Checklist for that show. It is the list of what needs to be in your marketing if you want to dominate your market online.
The bottom line
Your 20 years of experience is real. Google and ChatGPT just can't see it yet.
Reviews on the platforms AI models actually cite, content going up consistently, and your brand name showing up on other people's websites. That is how the real-world expertise you already have becomes the reason you get recommended.
Want to know exactly where you stand against your competition? Schedule a call with us, and we'll show you what your market leaders are doing, what you're missing, and what to fix first.
