How AI decides which businesses to recommend
What ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews seem to rely on when someone asks for a recommendation, in plain terms.
When someone asks ChatGPT for “the best dental clinic in Dubai Marina”, the answer usually names three to five businesses, with a sentence on each. It reads like advice from a friend. It is worth understanding roughly where that advice comes from, because it isn’t the same as a Google search.
The short version
AI assistants don’t keep a ranked list of businesses. For most local questions, they search the web in the background, read a handful of pages, and write an answer from what those pages say. The businesses that get named are usually the ones that appear, clearly and consistently, in the sources the assistant chose to read.
Nobody outside these companies knows exactly how the sources are chosen or weighed. What we can do is observe the answers and the sources they cite, many times over, and look for patterns. That is what this guide is based on.
What seems to matter
Being mentioned in the places the AI reads. In our scans, the most-cited sources for local businesses are Google Business Profiles, industry directories, editorial “best of” lists, review and booking platforms, and forum threads. A business’s own website is cited less often than people expect.
Saying the same thing everywhere. If your website, your Google profile and a directory all describe you as “a family dental clinic in Dubai Marina offering implants and Invisalign”, the AI has an easy time connecting you to a question about implants in Dubai Marina. If each place says something different, or your old address is still listed somewhere, it has less to go on and sometimes gets it wrong.
Specifics that match the question. People ask for a treatment, an area, a language, a price range, a type of customer. Pages that name those things plainly give the AI something to match. “Premium care for the whole family” gives it very little.
Reviews and what they say. Assistants often summarise reviews: “patients mention short waiting times”. The number of reviews matters less than having recent ones that describe what you actually do.
What doesn’t work
There is no form to submit and no one to pay for placement in AI answers. Anyone offering to sell you a guaranteed spot in ChatGPT is selling something that doesn’t exist.
Stuffing your website with keywords, or publishing dozens of thin pages, doesn’t seem to help either. Assistants tend to cite pages that explain something clearly, not pages written for search engines.
Answers change
Ask the same question twice and you may get a different list. Answers vary by wording, by location, by engine, and from one day to the next. That is why a single check tells you very little, and why we ask each question several times and count across all the runs.
What to do with this
Start by finding out where you stand: which questions you are named for, which you aren’t, and which sources the AI relies on for your category. Our guide to checking by hand explains how to do this yourself. If you would rather have it done properly, request a check.