How to Get Your Business AI-Search Ready

Kathleen Banks, CFRE, CFOP, of Advancement Digital presented "Your Next Client Is Asking AI for a Referral: How to Get Your Business AI-Search Ready" to the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce. Everyone is using AI for research. Customers now ask Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity who to call, and those tools answer the way a well-connected friend would, by naming the businesses they know about and have reason to trust. Nobody can guarantee a spot in those answers. What a business can control is what AI finds when it goes looking. The session covered seven fixes in the order they pay off, starting with the Google Business Profile and Search Console and moving on to answer pages, service-area pages, reviews, structured data and crawl files. It also showed how to measure results with Google's new AI report in Search Console and with Google Analytics, and why tracking and cookie consent now need the same attention as visibility. Attendees left with a checklist and a free Google AI-Ready Check.

Where to start:

Claim and correct your Google Business Profile. Make sure someone on your team holds the login, confirm your hours, services and categories, and add a photo or post at least once a month.

Connect your site to Google Search Console. It's free, and it's where Google tells you how it sees your site. If it's set up but nobody checks it, put a monthly reminder on the calendar.

Answer your top five customer questions, one page each. Put the answer in the first two sentences, in plain language, and name the service and the area you serve. A page that says "We provide comprehensive heating solutions tailored to your needs" gives AI nothing to quote. A page that says "Yes, we repair residential boilers across Brooklyn and Queens, usually within 48 hours" does.

Give each area you serve its own page, with something true and specific about that place. Please don't copy one page and swap the town name.

Give AI a reason to trust you. Ask for reviews consistently and respond to every one, including the difficult ones. Get listed where it makes sense for your industry (your Chamber directory listing counts!), and keep your name, address and phone identical everywhere. Never buy reviews.

Handle the technical labels. Structured data tells search engines your business details, and it should match your Business Profile exactly. Check that your robots.txt isn't blocking AI crawlers and that your sitemap is current. This is the part where a little outside help goes a long way