Ask ChatGPT for the best local business in an Australian city and its answer is frequently built from Google Business Profile data. Here is exactly what on your GBP influences AI recommendations, and the prioritised action list to fix it.
Ask ChatGPT "best plumber in Toowoomba" or "good physio near Wollongong" and watch what comes back. When it runs a web search to answer, the recommendations it assembles are frequently built from Google Maps and Google Business Profile listings: the business names, the categories, the review snippets, even the phrasing customers used in reviews. We see this pattern constantly when running citation audits for Australian service businesses. Your Google Business Profile is no longer just your Google storefront. It is your AI storefront too.
That changes what "a well-optimised GBP" means. The general mechanism of how ChatGPT selects businesses is covered in our guide to how ChatGPT recommends businesses, and the foundational setup of a profile is in our Google Business Profile optimisation guide. This post covers neither of those. It covers the specific question in between: which parts of your GBP actually influence what AI engines say about you, and in what order you should fix them. Categories, attributes, review text, photos, Q&A, service lists, and hours all carry different weight in an AI answer, and most owners are polishing the wrong ones.
If you want to see what AI engines currently say when someone asks for your service in your area, get a free AI citation audit and we will run the prompts for you.
TL;DR
- When ChatGPT answers "best [service] in [city]" queries with web search, its recommendations are frequently assembled from Google Maps and Google Business Profile data, so your GBP now feeds AI answers directly.
- Your primary category is the single strongest filter: AI engines shortlist businesses by category before anything else, and a wrong or vague category excludes you from answers entirely.
- AI answers quote review text, not just star ratings. Reviews that name the specific service and suburb become the evidence an AI cites when it recommends you.
- Service lists, attributes, and Q&A give AI engines structured facts to repeat: what you do, what you offer, and answers to common questions in your own words.
- Accurate opening hours matter more than most owners think, because AI engines confidently repeat them, and confidently wrong hours cost you jobs and reviews.
- Priority order: category, reviews with service keywords, complete service list, attributes, Q&A, photos, hours. Work top down.
Why your GBP is now your AI storefront
Here is the mechanic in brief. When an AI engine answers a local query, it needs a trustworthy, structured source of local business data. The most complete one on the web is Google's business index: verified listings with categories, locations, reviews, hours, and services, all in a consistent format. So when ChatGPT's web search surfaces local results, Google Maps listings and the pages built from them are prominent in what it reads. Perplexity and Copilot lean on the same class of structured local data through their own retrieval. Gemini and Google AI Overviews read Google's business data natively.
The consequence is blunt. The same profile fields you filled in years ago for map rankings are now raw material for generated answers. But AI engines use those fields differently from the Maps algorithm. Maps ranks you by relevance, distance, and prominence. An AI engine composes a sentence about you, which means it needs quotable facts and evidence. That difference is what the rest of this post unpacks, field by field.
One caveat before the list: none of this replaces your website. AI engines cross-check the profile against your site and other sources, and a strong GBP pointing to a weak site is a half-built AI SEO foundation. Treat this as one pillar of the wider AEO work.
Primary category: the filter that decides if you exist
Before an AI engine weighs anything else, it has to build a shortlist, and the shortlist is built by category. If someone asks for an emergency electrician and your primary category is "Contractor", you are not losing the comparison. You were never in it.
What to do:
- Make your primary category the most specific one that matches your core service. "Emergency plumber" beats "Plumber" for emergency queries. "Cosmetic dentist" beats "Dentist" for cosmetic queries. Check what category the businesses currently appearing in AI answers for your target query use, and match specificity.
- Use secondary categories for every real service line, not aspirational ones. Each legitimate secondary category adds you to another shortlist.
- Never keyword-stuff the business name field. AI engines repeat business names verbatim in answers, and "Smith Plumbing | Best Emergency Plumber Toowoomba 24/7" reads as spam to a model trained on natural language, besides violating Google's guidelines.
This is the highest-leverage five minutes on this entire list. We have seen businesses appear in AI answers for a service line within weeks simply because a category change put them in the candidate pool for the first time.
→ Free free local AI SEO audit: see whether ChatGPT and Google AI recommend your business, and who they name instead. Check my AI visibility.
Review text: the evidence AI engines quote
Star ratings get you considered. Review text gets you recommended. This is the part most owners miss about google business profile AI signals: when ChatGPT justifies a recommendation, it frequently paraphrases or near-quotes what reviewers wrote. "Customers mention fast response times for burst pipes" is a sentence built from review text, not from a star count.
That means the words inside your reviews are now marketing copy you do not write, and you should influence them the legitimate way: through the ask.
- Ask customers to mention the specific job and suburb. Not scripted, just prompted: "If you have a minute, it helps us if you mention what we did and where." A review saying "replaced our hot water system in Kirwan, same day" hands the AI a service, a suburb, and a proof point in one sentence.
- Prioritise recency and steady flow over bursts. AI engines, like Google, treat a steady stream of recent reviews as a sign of a currently good business. Twenty reviews from 2023 and silence since reads as decline.
- Reply to every review, especially negatives. Replies are part of the retrievable text on your listing. A calm, factual reply to a bad review is often the difference between an AI mentioning a complaint and an AI noting that issues get resolved.
- Never buy or fake reviews. Pattern detection catches it, and the penalty is your whole trust profile.
For the trades especially, review text is the dominant differentiator, because most competing profiles have similar categories and services. Our tradie SEO guide covers the review-generation system in detail.
Services list: the structured menu AI reads back
The services section of your GBP lets you list each service with a name and description. Most businesses leave it half-empty or lump everything under three vague entries. That is a direct loss, because AI engines treat the services list as a structured menu of what you do, and repeat entries from it when a query matches.
Fill it properly:
- One entry per real service, named the way customers ask for it: "blocked drain clearing", "split system installation", "wisdom tooth removal". Not internal jargon.
- Write the descriptions. Two or three plain sentences saying what the service includes and who it suits. These descriptions are retrievable text.
- Cover the long tail. The niche services are where AI answers are least contested. Few pest control profiles list "pre-purchase termite inspection" as a distinct service, so the ones that do get named for it.
Attributes: small toggles, outsized answers
Attributes are the checkboxes on your profile: wheelchair accessible, free quotes, online estimates, women-owned, emergency services, on-site parking. They look trivial. They are not, because they map directly onto the qualifiers people put in AI prompts. "Best dentist in Hobart that does payment plans" or "electrician near Geelong open weekends" are exactly the queries where an attribute either includes you or excludes you.
Audit every attribute Google offers for your category and set every one that truthfully applies. Then check the qualifiers your customers actually use, and make sure the matching attributes, services, and review evidence all agree. An attribute claiming emergency service with no review ever mentioning an after-hours job is a weak signal; the two together are a strong one.
Be the business AI recommends
Q&A: answer the questions before the AI improvises
The questions and answers section on your profile is public, retrievable text, and it is the only place on your GBP where you can publish direct answers to common questions in your own words. Left empty, it is a void. Worse, anyone can post a question, and unanswered or community-answered questions become the record.
Seed it yourself, which is allowed: post the eight to ten questions you get on the phone every week, and answer each in two to four sentences. Do you charge a call-out fee? Do you service my suburb? How fast can you attend an emergency? Are you licensed and insured? These are precisely the follow-up questions people ask AI engines, and a first-party answer on a verified profile is a source an engine can lift directly. Keep answers factual and standalone, the same discipline we teach for content AI will cite.
Photos: proof of a real, operating business
Photos do not get quoted in a text answer, so owners assume they do not matter for AI. Two reasons they still do. First, multimodal engines increasingly read images, and photos of real jobs, real vehicles, and real premises corroborate that your listing describes an actual operating business, which feeds the trust assessment. Second, photo volume and recency correlate with profile completeness and activity, and complete, active profiles are what engines prefer to recommend.
Keep it simple: upload genuine job photos monthly, name the files sensibly before upload, and make sure your premises, team, and work are all represented. Skip stock photography entirely. A model that has seen the same stock image on four hundred websites learns nothing from it, and a human who clicks through learns worse.
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We tested 151 top-rated Australian tradies and 84% were never named by ChatGPT. Check your business before your competitor checks theirs.
Check my AI visibility →Opening hours: the fact AI repeats most confidently
AI engines state opening hours as flat fact. "They are open until 5pm today." If your listed hours are wrong, the engine is now confidently sending customers to a closed door, and the resulting one-star "showed up and they were shut" review becomes retrievable evidence against you.
Keep base hours exact, set holiday hours ahead of every public holiday (Australian ones, including the state-specific ones your interstate customers forget), and if you offer 24/7 emergency service, reflect it in the emergency service attribute and services list rather than falsely listing 24-hour opening hours for a shopfront that is not staffed overnight. Accuracy here is trust, and trust is the currency of every ai recommendation a local business earns.
The prioritised action list
Do these in order. The first three carry most of the weight.
- Fix your primary category to the most specific true match, and add every legitimate secondary category. (Thirty minutes.)
- Build the review engine. Ask every completed job for a review within 24 hours, prompting for service and suburb mentions. Reply to everything. (Ongoing, the single biggest long-term lever.)
- Complete the services list. Every real service, named in customer language, with a written description. (One to two hours.)
- Set every truthful attribute, aligned with how customers qualify their prompts. (Twenty minutes.)
- Seed the Q&A with your ten most common phone questions and factual answers. (One hour.)
- Upload genuine photos monthly and delete anything stock. (Ongoing.)
- Verify hours, set holiday hours each quarter, and align emergency availability across attributes and services. (Twenty minutes, quarterly.)
- Cross-check consistency between your GBP, your website, and your directory listings, because engines verify entities across sources and contradictions cost you confidence. Your name, address, phone, and service claims should match everywhere.
Then measure. Once a month, ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity the handful of queries that matter to you ("best [your service] in [your city]", plus qualifier variations) and record whether you appear and what evidence the engine cites. That prompt panel, alongside your normal GBP insights, tells you whether the work is landing.
What this looks like by industry
The fields that move AI answers vary by category. For plumbers and electricians, emergency attributes and response-time review mentions dominate, because urgency drives the queries. For dentists and physiotherapists, procedure-specific services entries and review depth matter most, because patients ask comparative, condition-specific questions. For builders and landscapers, photo volume and project-specific review text carry the proof, because the queries are about quality and trust rather than speed. Same checklist, different emphasis.
Find out if AI recommends your business
We test the real questions your customers ask across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI, then show you which local businesses get named instead of you and what it takes to change that. Free, no pitch.
Tested: 151 top-rated Australian tradies · 15.9% named by ChatGPT · Q3 2026 study
Check my AI visibility →Frequently asked questions
Does ChatGPT really use Google Business Profile data?
When ChatGPT answers local queries with web search enabled, the results it reads frequently include Google Maps listings and pages built from Google Business Profile data, because that is the most complete structured source of local business information on the web. We see GBP-derived details, including review phrasing, appear in its answers regularly during citation audits. Other engines like Gemini and Google AI Overviews read Google's business data natively.
Which Google Business Profile field matters most for AI recommendations?
Your primary category, because AI engines shortlist businesses by category before evaluating anything else. A vague or wrong category excludes you from answers regardless of how strong your reviews are. After category, review text is the biggest lever, since AI answers quote and paraphrase what customers wrote when justifying a recommendation.
Do star ratings or review text matter more to AI engines?
Both matter, but they do different jobs. Star ratings and review volume get you into the trusted pool; review text supplies the specific evidence an AI uses to describe and recommend you. A 4.8-star business whose reviews name specific services and suburbs will be described more accurately, and recommended more often, than a 4.9-star business with one-line "great service" reviews.
Can I optimise my GBP for AI without changing my website?
You can improve your AI visibility meaningfully through the profile alone, especially the category, services, and review work. But engines cross-check your profile against your website and directory listings, so a profile that contradicts a thin or inconsistent site hits a trust ceiling. The profile and the website are one entity to an AI, and both need to agree.
How often should I update my Google Business Profile for AI visibility?
Reviews and replies should be continuous, photos monthly, and a full field audit quarterly, including holiday hours ahead of each public holiday. AI engines reward current, active profiles, and retrieval happens in real time, so stale data gets repeated to customers as soon as it goes wrong. A 30-minute monthly routine covers it.
Do Google Posts help with AI recommendations?
Posts are a minor signal compared with categories, reviews, and services, but they contribute activity and fresh retrievable text to your listing. If you have news worth posting, offers, or completed projects, post them. Do not manufacture filler posts at the expense of the review and services work higher up the priority list.
Your Google Business Profile is being read to your future customers, out loud, by machines you do not control. The only question is whether it says what you want it to say. Work through the priority list above, or if you would rather see exactly which prompts your business currently appears in and which fields are holding you back, book a free AI citation audit and we will map it for you as part of a full AEO review.