The behaviour has already changed
Somebody in Royal Oak who needs an epoxy garage floor, a chiropractor in Canton, a caterer in Dearborn — an increasing number of them are typing the question into an assistant rather than a search bar, and acting on the two or three businesses it names.
That is a harder game than search. A results page has ten organic listings, a map pack and ads. An assistant answer has room for maybe three names and no page two. You are either in the answer or you do not exist for that question.
It is worth being honest about the scale: AI referrals are still a low single-digit share of most sites’ traffic. This is not an emergency and it is not a replacement for Google or for paid search. It is a compounding side bet that costs little to place now and cannot be placed retroactively.
Step one is not content. It is whether you can be read at all.
Before any of the advice below matters, one thing has to be true: an assistant has to be able to read your website. Most of these systems do not execute JavaScript. If your site builds its content in the visitor’s browser rather than sending finished HTML, they receive an almost empty document no matter how good the page looks to a person.
We measured this across 1,348 recently funded companies and found 8.7% in exactly that state — the median one returning 55 characters of text where the rendered page had 5,358. Counter-intuitively, the sites on modern JavaScript frameworks were the worst affected and the ones on Wix and Squarespace were the best.
Run the check before you spend a dollar on content. There is a free tool at revioconsulting.com/tools/ai-visibility, or ask whoever built your site to fetch the homepage without JavaScript and show you the response. If the answer is an empty container, every other tactic in this article is being applied on top of nothing.
What these systems actually read about a local business
Assistants assemble a local answer from more than your website, and the mix is different from what ranks in classic search.
Review text matters more than review score. When a system is matching a request like “someone reliable who shows up on time in Novi,” it is matching against the language in your reviews, not your star average. A 4.7 with reviews that describe punctuality and clean work beats a 4.9 that only says “great job.” This is worth telling customers when you ask for a review — a sentence about what you actually did is worth more than a rating.
Third-party listings carry real weight. ChatGPT’s local results lean heavily on Foursquare data, and OpenAI licensed Yelp’s review corpus in July 2026. Bing-based results surface Facebook reviews more than most people expect. Almost nobody works their Facebook reviews, which makes it one of the few remaining cheap edges.
Reddit remains a significant source for local recommendations — larger than the home-service marketplaces combined. Not something to game, but worth knowing that a genuine local thread mentioning you has outsized value.
And listicles still work. Roughly 44% of the pages ChatGPT cites are blog-style “best X in Y” posts. Being included in someone else’s roundup correlates more strongly with being named than having a good page of your own.
Write the pages that answer the actual question
The content that gets extracted into an answer is not a services page. It is a page that answers a specific question directly, in the first forty words, before any preamble.
Four question types cover most of what a local buyer wants to know before they call. What does it cost. What goes wrong. Who is this not right for. Should I repair what I have or replace it. The third one is the most underused page in local marketing — almost nobody publishes who they are not a good fit for, and it is the single most trust-building thing you can write.
Make the question the headline, answer it immediately, then explain. If the page opens with three paragraphs about your commitment to quality before it gets to the number, there is nothing extractable in it.
Localise the two best pages per service rather than spinning up a page per city. A page about Royal Oak that says something true about Royal Oak beats ten pages with the city name swapped, and search engines have been discounting the latter for years.
The Michigan advantage nobody writes about
The most citable local content is the content only a local operator could write. In Metro Detroit that means the things national competitors get wrong or omit entirely.
Freeze-thaw cycles and what they do to concrete and driveways. Road salt and chloride exposure through winter. What can and cannot be installed between December and February, and which materials cure in the cold. Slab moisture in basements built on clay. The difference between a Plymouth City and Plymouth Township address when someone is checking whether you serve them.
Those pages are cheap to write, impossible for a national franchise to fake, and they answer questions people genuinely search. That is the whole formula.
What nobody can sell you
Be sceptical of anyone promising you a ranking in an AI answer. Ask an assistant the same question twice and the business it names is the same only a small fraction of the time. The results are not stable enough to promise, and anybody guaranteeing placement is either misinformed or counting on you not checking.
What can be controlled is eligibility. Whether there is something to read. Whether it is structured so a machine can extract it. Whether your listings agree with each other. Whether your reviews describe what you actually do. Whether the claims on your site are verifiable.
That is the honest offer, and it happens to be the same work that makes your site better for the humans who find you the old way.