A buyer who once typed three words into Google now asks an assistant a full question: which accounting firm in JLT handles corporate tax registration for a small free zone company? The assistant names a few firms. Whether yours is one of them depends on what it can read about you.
What assistants draw on
Assistants answer from what they learned in training and, more and more, from what they find when they search the web before answering. For local business questions the sources include company websites, Google profiles and reviews, directories, news and forums. Studies differ on the mix. Several have found a large share of citations come from third parties rather than a business’s own site.
Five things a small business can do
1. Make sure you can be read. Check your robots.txt and your hosting’s bot settings. Our post on blocking AI crawlers has a five minute check. In our scan of five Dubai accounting firm sites, two blocked an AI crawler.
2. Say it plainly. Your homepage and service pages should state in text what you do and where. Our scan of five Dubai law firm sites found every one readable and none written to be quoted.
3. Answer the questions. One page or post per real buyer question, with the short answer first.
4. Keep your facts consistent. The same name, address and services on your website, Google profile, LinkedIn and directories.
5. Earn mentions honestly. Reviews, partner pages, press. Do not buy a place on a “best of” list written by its authors. We found every “best tax consultant in Dubai” ranking on the first page we checked was self published.
Ranking is not the same as being cited
A page can rank well on Google and never appear in an AI answer. Our post on why ranking is not being cited explains why the two have split.
Measuring it
Pick eight to twelve questions your buyers ask, with places and needs. Ask them to ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude every month in a clean session and save each answer with the date and exact wording. That is our monthly check for every client. Our free audit does it once for you, emailed within a working day.
What nobody can promise
A position or a number of enquiries from AI. Answers change from one assistant to another and from week to week. What can be promised is the work and an honest, dated record of whether it moved.