How AI assistants choose a local business, and how to get recommended

Short answer: When a customer asks an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude to find a local business, the assistant usually searches the web, reads a few pages and names the businesses whose details it can find. It doesn’t keep a private list of tradies. What it can say about you is limited to what your website and listings say in plain text: what you do, where you work, what it costs and how to get a quote. Ranking in normal search still matters most. Some assistants are also starting to act for the customer, for example by asking businesses for a quote.

First: what’s an AI assistant, and what’s an AI agent?

An AI assistant is a chat app you type or talk to: ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft Copilot or Perplexity. You ask a question in normal words and it answers in sentences. For questions about the real world, such as “who does crane truck hire near Burleigh Heads?”, most assistants search the web first and summarise what they find.

An AI agent goes a step further. Google describes agents as software that pursues goals and completes tasks on a user’s behalf, while with an assistant the user still makes the decisions. An agent can fill in a form, send a request or work through a task with several steps. OpenAI and Anthropic both describe agents that hand control back to the person, or pause for them to check, at key points. Agents are newer and less common than assistants, but the big AI companies are all building them.

For a service business, the difference matters:

• An assistant can only recommend you, by naming you in an answer.

• An agent can contact you on the customer’s behalf, if it has a way to reach you that it understands.

Are your customers using AI?

Many already are:

• More than half of Australians use AI tools. Roy Morgan estimates 13.6 million Australians aged 14 and over, or 58%, used AI tools such as ChatGPT in an average four weeks in early 2026. ChatGPT alone reached 10.5 million.

• For some, it’s now the main way to look things up. Telsyte found 12% of Australians name AI tools as their main way of finding information online, up from 5% a year earlier.

• In the US, asking AI about local businesses took off in a year. In BrightLocal’s survey of 1,002 US adults, 45% said they’d used ChatGPT or other AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before. The 2026 survey also listed more AI tools by name, so part of that jump comes from the changed question.

No Australian survey yet measures how many people use AI to find a tradie, physio or painter. The direction is clear, though, and the businesses an assistant names are the ones whose details it could find.

What happens when a customer asks

Here’s a typical request:

“I need a crane truck to move a 7-tonne container from Burleigh Heads to Yatala on Friday morning. Who can do it?”

1. The customer describes the whole job. They don’t type search keywords. They give the job, the suburbs, the timing and the size.

2. The assistant searches and shortlists. It turns the request into one or more web searches, reads a handful of pages, and names the few businesses it found clear, matching details for. If your site doesn’t say you do crane truck hire, cover Burleigh Heads and can lift 7 tonnes, the assistant has nothing to go on.

3. It may offer to ask for a quote. An assistant that can act as an agent may offer to contact those businesses for the customer. It can only do that through a channel it can use: a form it can fill in, an app it’s connected to, or an agent-facing service.

Agents are starting to ask for quotes

This is already being tested:

• OpenAI is testing a “Get Quote” button in ChatGPT. It appears on local business results and opens a quote-request form inside the chat. OpenAI’s developer documentation says the feature is “currently in beta and being tested with approved partners”. It doesn’t say which countries have it.

• Australians can post a job without leaving ChatGPT. Since August 2026, Airtasker’s ChatGPT connector has let people post a task, compare offers and hire someone inside the chat.

• OpenAI lists “request quotes from businesses” among the tasks ChatGPT’s cloud browser can help with on paid plans. It asks before taking consequential steps. OpenAI doesn’t say which regions have it.

• Google’s AI can phone local businesses to ask about prices and availability for the customer. Google’s help pages name only the US for this. In Australia, Google’s AI Mode already finds restaurant tables across booking platforms.

For a business, the change is that the “customer” filling in your enquiry form may soon be software acting for a person. It needs your services, areas and quote questions in a form it can read.

Where each assistant looks

Every assistant has its own setup, and none documents it in full. This is what the companies say themselves, as at October 2026.

Two things follow from this:

• Normal search access is the real gate. If Google and Bing can’t crawl your site, most assistants can’t find you either.

• Training and search are separate. Each company runs its training crawler (such as OpenAI’s GPTBot and Anthropic’s ClaudeBot) separately from its search crawler. You can block training without leaving AI answers. Blocking the search crawlers keeps you out.

What helps you get named, and what’s folklore

For the search basics (Google Business Profile, your website and what to fix first), see our SEO guide for tradies.

Why one check isn’t enough

Ask the same assistant the same question twice and you can get different businesses. Researchers have shown that one-off AI visibility checks are “misleadingly precise”, so measure by asking several times and counting how often you’re named.

Agent-facing directories: a structured way in

A website is written for people. An agent has to work out from your pages what you do, where and for how much, and that’s where mistakes creep in. An agent-facing directory publishes the same facts in a structured form an agent can read directly, with a way to send a request.

This is how Localdex handles one:

1. A customer, or their assistant, describes the job. AI only interprets the request into structured details: the service, the pickup and delivery suburbs, the load and the date.

2. Plain database rules decide who’s eligible, not an AI: the right category, the suburbs you cover, the capacity you can handle.

3. The customer approves the request before anything is sent, and it goes to up to three matching businesses.

4. It lands in your Localdex inbox with the details you said you need to quote.

Today, agents reach Localdex through its MCP server, its A2A agent and its API. Localdex has no partnership with OpenAI, Google or Anthropic, and being listed doesn’t guarantee any assistant will name you.

How to check what AI says about you

Localdex’s free website check asks an AI assistant (Claude, with web search, set to your suburb) the questions your customers would ask. It shows how many answers named you, who was named instead, which sites it used, and whether the phone number and email it gave match your website. Use it as a starting point and re-check every few months. As above, a single run is a sample, not a verdict.

FAQ

Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT? Not in its answers. ChatGPT now shows ads to Australian users on its Free and Go plans, but OpenAI says ads are labelled as sponsored, shown separately from the answer, and that advertisers can’t shape or rank what ChatGPT says. Be wary of anyone who promises to “rank you #1 in ChatGPT”. Nobody controls what an assistant chooses to say.

Is Localdex part of OpenAI’s Get Quote test? No. Localdex has no partnership with OpenAI. Agents connect to Localdex through its own MCP server, A2A agent and API.

Will being on Localdex make ChatGPT recommend me? No guarantee. Localdex gives agents that connect to it a structured profile and a way to send you a quote request. What ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude say in their own answers is up to them.

Should I block AI bots? Block training crawlers if you want to. Don’t block the search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot and Bingbot) if you want to be found. If your site is behind Cloudflare, check its AI-crawler setting.

Do I need an llms.txt file? Not for search. Google doesn’t use it, and the big AI crawlers rarely request it.

Is this just SEO? Mostly. The basics are the same, and Google says so. The extra step is making your facts plain enough for an assistant to repeat, and giving agents a way to reach you.

Sources

• Google Search Central, “AI features and your website” (updated 10 Dec 2025) and the AI optimisation guide (May 2026, updated 10 Jul 2026)

• Google Australia, AI Mode launch in Australia (8 Oct 2025)

• Roy Morgan, Finding 10248, “13.6 million Australians now use AI tools like ChatGPT…” (2 Jun 2026; Jan–Mar 2026, n=14,646, aged 14+)

• Telsyte, “Four in five AI users now engage monthly as Australia’s user base surges past 17 million” (2 Jun 2026; n=2,023, aged 16+)

• BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (11 Feb 2026; n=1,002 US adults)

• Google Cloud, “What are AI agents?”; OpenAI, “A practical guide to building agents” (Apr 2025); Anthropic, “Building effective agents” (19 Dec 2024)

• OpenAI, “Local services Get Quote conversion spec” (developers.openai.com, checked 13 Oct 2026)

• OpenAI Help Center, “Using cloud browser in ChatGPT” (checked 13 Oct 2026)

• OpenAI Help Center, “Ads in ChatGPT” and “Ads Manager availability” (Australia listed; checked 13 Oct 2026 via search, the pages block direct fetching); mi-3, “OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads pilot to Australia, New Zealand and Canada” (27 Mar 2026)

• Airtasker, “Introducing Airtasker on ChatGPT” (13 Aug 2026)

• Google, “New AI features in Google Search: call a business” (16 Jul 2025); Google Business Profile Help, “About automated calls and texts from Google to your business”; Google Search Help, “Use AI Mode to check local availability and pricing” (checked 13 Oct 2026)

• OpenAI, “Overview of OpenAI crawlers”

• Anthropic, “Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler?” (7 Apr 2026)

• Perplexity, “Perplexity crawlers”

• Peec, “ChatGPT search result providers” (Sep 2026)

• C-SEO Bench, NeurIPS 2025 Datasets and Benchmarks (arXiv 2506.11097)

• Ahrefs, schema and AI citations test (May 2026); brand mentions and AI Overviews (75,000 brands)

• Seer Interactive, content recency and AI visibility (Jul 2026)

• EZY.ai, llms.txt server-log study (Apr–Jul 2026)

• Sielinski, measurement uncertainty in AI visibility (arXiv 2603.08924)