4 Steps to Better AI Visibility

I provided you with a lot of context around AI visibility throughout August. Now that September is here let’s talk about some steps you can take to improve yours!

Doing this is simpler than you might expect. Especially if you’re already experienced with general Local SEO best practices.

Here’s how you can get started in four easy steps:

See if you appear in AI results
Define what makes you different
Put that everywhere customers are
Build compounding channels

Let's go through each.

STEP 1: SEE IF YOU APPEAR IN AI RESULTS

Before you fix or optimize anything, you need to know if you appear for relevant searches in AI results and which platforms (since they all do things a bit differently).

Pick 5-10 queries that reflect how real customers might talk to AI about what your industry does in general.

Not "plumber Phoenix." Think real questions with context:

"Who's a good plumber in North Phoenix for a slab leak that won't overcharge me?"
"What's the best HVAC company in Scottsdale for same-day AC repair?"
"I need a personal injury lawyer in Houston who's handled truck accidents — who's actually good?"
"Pediatric dentist in Atlanta that's good with anxious kids?"

If you’re stuck on where to start, ask the sales team. Your front desk, your customer service reps. You can even go through old inbound emails and leads to find the questions your customers were asking you (and are now probably asking AI).

Big thing you need to recreate in your list: How do real customers describe what they need when they first reach out?

Then run them through ChatGPT and Gemini.

For each query, note:

Do you appear?
What position? First mentioned? Third? Not at all?
What does AI say about you when you do appear?
Who else appears?

For multi-location: pick your strongest market and your weakest. Run the same queries in both. See the variance.

This takes 30 minutes. You'll learn more about your AI visibility than any free audit report will tell you.

Note: You do not need software for this, in fact manually doing each search now is very helpful, but if you have budget and are in it for the long haul, now is a good time to consider signing up for one. You probably don’t want to do this every day :)

STEP 2: DEFINE WHAT MAKES YOU DIFFERENT

Here's where most businesses fail. It’s not because they're a bad business.

They’ve just done a bad job telling the online world how they’re different from the others.

Why is this important?

AI wants to justify its recommendations (before it makes them to the user). It needs to say why something is the right answer for this specific query a user entered.

If your unique differentiators aren’t front and center and talked about loud and clear online, it’s tough for AI to recommend you.

So the question: What's your positioning?

Not your tagline. Not your mission statement. Your actual differentiation.

Questions to consider:

What do you do better than anyone else in your market?
Who do you serve that others don't serve as well?
What's the specific problem you solve that others can't?
Why should someone pick you over the other 15 options?

Most businesses can't answer this clearly. They say things like:

"We provide exceptional service and treat every customer like family."

That's not positioning. That's a Hallmark card. Every competitor says the same thing.

Real positioning sounds like:

"We specialize in same-day emergency AC repair. If your system dies at 2pm in August, we'll have someone there by 5pm. Most competitors book 3-5 days out."
"We only handle truck accident cases. No slip-and-falls, no fender benders. Truck accidents are what we know, and we've recovered $50M+ for clients in the past five years."
"We're the pediatric dental practice where anxious kids actually want to come back. Our entire office — from the waiting room to the procedures — is designed around making kids comfortable."

Specific. Differentiated. Gives AI something to say.

For multi-location: this could vary by market!

Your Phoenix locations might emphasize AC expertise. Your Minneapolis locations might emphasize heating. Same company, different positioning by geography.

Or you might have a brand-level positioning that applies everywhere. Either way, you need to be able to articulate it clearly everywhere.

Otherwise you won’t stand out for what you’re best at and get lumped in with the rest of the “pretty good companies” doing the “exact same thing.”

STEP 3: PUT THAT EVERYWHERE

Once you have clear positioning, it needs to show up in every place AI might look.

Your GBP description

This is the first place to check. Does your business description communicate your actual differentiation? Or is it generic "serving the community since 1985" language?

Rewrite it to lead with what makes you different.

Your website (especially the homepage and service pages)

Can someone land on your homepage and understand what makes you different within 10 seconds? Or do they have to dig?

Your positioning should be in:

The headline or first paragraph of your homepage
The first paragraph of each core service page
Your about page
Any location-specific pages

Your directory listings

Yelp, industry directories, anywhere you have a description field. Most businesses set these up once with generic copy and never touch them again.

Update them. Same positioning, adapted for each platform.

Your review responses

When you respond to reviews, you have an opportunity to reinforce your positioning:

"Thanks for mentioning our same-day response — that's exactly what we built the company around."

This adds more content that reinforces what you're about.

The consistency test:

If AI reads your GBP, your website, your Yelp listing, and your recent reviews, does it get a clear, consistent picture of what makes you different?

Or does it get five different vague descriptions that could apply to any competitor?

For multi-location: audit each location's presence separately

The variance is usually significant. Some locations will have strong, differentiated descriptions. Others will have whatever template was used at setup three years ago.

Create a positioning statement for each location (or each market, or each region) based on a centrally approved one and push it across all platforms so there’s brand control, but unique elements for each location present.

STEP 4: BUILD COMPOUNDING CHANNELS

Steps 1-3 are the foundation. They get you from invisible to visible.

Step 4 is what builds a visibility advantage over time.

Review content that mentions your differentiation

If your positioning is "same-day emergency service," you want reviews that mention same-day emergency service. You may have already experienced Google showing review snippets when searching for things.

To take advantage of this, you need to adjust how you ask for reviews:

"If you have a minute to leave a review, it really helps when customers mention what brought them in and how we helped, especially the expedited timeline."

Over time, your reviews become evidence of your positioning. AI reads that evidence and uses it to recommend you.

Just be careful not to force customers into saying something; Google’s review filters detect unusual patterns...

Third-party validation

Your website says you're the best at X. What does anyone else say?

Press coverage that mentions your specialty
"Best Of" awards in your category
Industry recognition
Community mentions

This is the Lost Decade work I mentioned two weeks ago. It takes time, but it creates credibility that's hard to replicate.

Content that answers specific questions

Build out content around the specific situations you handle:

"What to do when your AC dies on a weekend"
"How truck accident claims differ from car accident claims"
"How we help anxious kids feel comfortable at the dentist"

These become source material for AI when someone asks a question that matches.

Note: Go beyond the normal 200-300 word FAQ section and really flesh these out. Bring in unique personal experiences from the business using real-life scenarios or “case studies” from the past that other companies couldn’t use or claim as a backdrop.

For multi-location: turn your best locations into case studies

Which locations have the strongest AI visibility? What are they doing differently?

Usually it's some combination of: clearer positioning, better review content, more local press mentions, more community involvement.

Document it. Build a playbook. Roll it out to weaker locations.

THE SEQUENCE

Week 1: Run the queries. See where you stand.

Week 2: Define your positioning. Get specific about what makes you different.

Week 3: Update your GBP and website with that positioning.

Week 4: Update directories and other platforms for consistency.

Week 5+: Build the compounding stuff like review content, third-party mentions, specific content.

Monthly: Re-run your queries. See what changed.

THE MEASUREMENT

Manual spot checks are enough to start. Same 5-10 queries, same platforms, logged somewhere you can compare month over month.

At scale, Local SEO Data has AI visibility endpoints that query ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity programmatically and return structured data. You can run this across a portfolio and track trends.

The metrics that matter:

Do you appear? (yes/no, for which queries)
What does AI say about you when you do? (is it your positioning or generic?)
Who else appears? (competitive context)
What does AI say about the competitors appearing?
What's changing over time?

THE BOTTOM LINE

AI visibility isn't complicated. It's just different from what most businesses have been doing.

Check if you appear.
Define what makes you different.
Put that everywhere AI might look.
Build content and credibility that compounds.

Most businesses fail at step 2. They've never articulated a clear positioning.

So they show up everywhere sounding like everyone else in an attempt to capture all of the market, rather than clearly pinpointing exactly who they serve and why they are different.

Fix that first. Everything else follows.

Talk soon,
Garrett

P.S. — This playbook is built into Local SEO Skills if you want to run it with AI assistance. The positioning work, the presence audits, the consistency checks. LocalSEOSkills.com to see how it works. LocalSEOData.com for the AI visibility data layer.