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How to add Google reviews to Squarespace (code block)

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To add Google reviews to Squarespace, paste a widget snippet into a code block on a page, on a Core plan or above. Squarespace does not read a Google Business Profile, so a third-party service has to supply the reviews. The block you paste them into decides whether anything renders at all.

I checked this on 6 September 2026 against the Squarespace Help Center, Google's review snippet documentation and the FTC's consumer reviews rule. I could not sign in to a Squarespace account for this piece, so the pictures below are Squarespace's own help pages, each captured from the article the rule comes from. Squarespace publishes no screenshots of its own editor, so there is no picture here of the block menu.

Which Squarespace plan do you need to add Google reviews?

A review widget is JavaScript, and JavaScript in a code block is a paid feature. Squarespace's code blocks guide draws the line in two sentences: "On all plans, code blocks support plain text, HTML, Markdown, and CSS code surrounded by <style></style> tags", and "Adding JavaScript or iframes to code blocks is available in the Core, Plus, Advanced, Business, Commerce Basic, and Commerce Advanced plans."

Those six plan names are not a mistake. The current lineup on Choosing the right Squarespace plan is Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced, and Business, Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced are older names Squarespace still honours. Squarespace puts no date on the change, only that "we sometimes change our plans to best group features for our customers". An older guide telling you to buy the Business plan means Core.

Plan	JavaScript in a code block	Code injection
Basic	No	No
Core	Yes	Yes
Plus	Yes	Yes
Advanced	Yes	Yes
Business, Commerce Basic, Commerce Advanced (older names)	Yes	Yes

Core is the first plan whose feature list carries the line "Custom code, including the code block and code injection".

Custom code is the last line of the Core tab. It is not on the Basic one.

On Basic you can still paste the snippet into a code block. The script will not run. Squarespace does not publish what you see in its place, so check the plan before you debug anything else.

Squarespace has no Google reviews feature

Squarespace does have a reviews feature, and it is the wrong one. Customer reviews emails a buyer automatically 14 days after you fulfil their order, and the limit is in Squarespace's own words: "Customers can leave reviews for physical, download, service, and subscription products. It's not possible to collect reviews for gift cards or broadly for your business." Those reviews live on product pages in a store. They never touch your Google profile.

The other route people expect is Squarespace Extensions, which Squarespace calls "the equivalent of plugins, add-ons, or apps". They connect on all plans. Reading the catalogue on 6 September 2026, there is no Google reviews widget in it.

Price the dependency before you connect one anyway. Squarespace says extensions "aren't official Squarespace integrations" and "fall outside our scope of support", and that after you disconnect one "the service may still have data you sent while the extension was connected". A snippet you delete in one click is the smaller commitment.

Either way, you are using a third-party snippet. The choice that causes trouble is which of Squarespace's three code surfaces to put it on.

Code block, embed block or code injection

Squarespace takes code in three places, and picking the wrong one causes most of the failures.

Route	What it is for	Use it when
Code block	Custom HTML, and JavaScript on Core and above	The reviews belong in one spot on one page
Embed block	oEmbed content from services Squarespace recognises	You are embedding a video or a social post, not a widget
Code injection	Site header or footer, every page	A floating badge or a script you want everywhere

The embed block is the trap because it has the right-sounding name. Squarespace's embed blocks guide says embed blocks "pull content from services that use the oEmbed standard or manually set embed codes", then closes the door in a single line: "To add other code to your site, use code blocks." A widget's script tag is not an oEmbed response. What you get is an empty box.

Code injection is site-wide, not sectional. Code injection puts code in the <head> tag or before the closing </body> tag on every page of the site, which suits a floating badge and little else. It runs on Core, Plus, Advanced and some legacy plans, and it has a documented hole: "Code injection won't appear on Index landing pages." A per-page version sits in the Pages panel, under the gear icon, then Advanced.

Fluid Engine or the classic editor: where the block can go

Fluid Engine is "the primary editing experience for sites on Squarespace version 7.1" and "isn't available on version 7.0 sites". Telling the two apart takes a second. A Fluid Engine section has an Add Block button in its top-left corner once you click Edit, and a grid behind the blocks as you drag them, which you can pin by pressing G. No button and no grid means the classic editor, where you add blocks by clicking a + icon instead. Every block area on version 7.0 uses the classic editor.

Fluid Engine lets you place a reviews block exactly, then rearrange it for phones. Squarespace's mobile layout guide is specific: "You can arrange the mobile layout of Fluid Engine sections without affecting the desktop layout." It stays one block, so the phone view needs no second copy of the snippet.

Version 7.0 restricts where blocks can go at all. You cannot add one to an album, blog, cover, events, gallery, index or store page. If the reviews belong on a page of one of those types, per-page code injection is the way in. Squarespace does not write that down as a recipe anywhere: it follows from the code injection article, and it is my inference rather than their instruction.

You cannot do either job on your phone. Squarespace's blocks guide says the app "doesn't support adding or rearranging blocks on layout pages, only editing existing ones". Do this at a desk.

How to add Google reviews to Squarespace, step by step

Build the widget before you open Squarespace. Pick the layout and theme in your review service, point it at the right Google location, and copy the snippet it gives you.
Open the page and click Edit. Hover over the section where the reviews belong, then click Add Block, or a + icon in the classic editor.
Choose Code from the block menu, then click the pencil icon on the block to open its editor.
Leave the Type menu on HTML and paste the snippet. Squarespace is blunt about this one: "Code blocks set to CSS or JavaScript display code as text by default. To render CSS or JavaScript in code blocks, select HTML from the drop-down menu." Pick JavaScript and your visitors read your script tag instead of your reviews. Leave Display Source switched off.

The snippet is usually one line with an id in it:
```
<script src="https://app.cloutly.com/add-widget-v2.js" data-widget="YOUR-WIDGET-ID" async></script>
```
That one is ours. Cloutly holds the connection to your Google location, offers nine layouts, and gives back one line. A Squarespace code block takes it as it is, and so does any other site that accepts an HTML snippet. The review widgets page shows the layouts. Keep the async attribute whatever service you use, or the browser stops building your page until the widget arrives.
Put the block next to the ask. Directly beneath the booking or enquiry button on a service page, not down at the foot of the homepage. A reviews block in a footer is decoration. One above the form is evidence.
Save, then open the live page in a private window. The editor proves nothing, for the reasons below.

What the snippet renders once it is in the block. New reviews turn up on their own.

Why your review block is blank

Check these four documented causes in this order.

You are logged in. Squarespace says so on the code blocks page: "As a security measure, sometimes your code won't appear when you're logged in, even if visitors can see it." Click Preview in Safe Mode, or use a private window.

You are on Basic. See the plan table. The block is sitting on the page and the script is not running.

The page sits inside an Index. Squarespace lists this in its own troubleshooting: "Your code might not render if you've added it to a page within an Index."

Ajax loading is on. Version 7.0 only. Ajax loading swaps page content without a full reload on five template families, Brine, Farro, Skye, Tremont and York, and Squarespace warns that it "may conflict with embedded custom code". The tell is a block that works on a hard refresh and disappears when a visitor arrives through your own navigation.

Squarespace support will not troubleshoot any of it. It says code-based customisation "falls outside the scope of our support", and names the part that bites: "how it functions with our responsive design, particularly its appearance on mobile devices." Check the block at 390 pixels wide yourself, and run a speed test afterwards. Third-party JavaScript is the usual culprit when a page that used to load quickly stops.

Stars, filtering, and keeping the block current

Two things to settle before you publish, and one habit to start. The parent guide on how to embed Google reviews carries the long version, including the Places API and the screenshot route.

An embedded block will not put stars under your own result in Google. Google's review snippet documentation says that where the reviewed entity controls the reviews about itself, its pages using LocalBusiness or Organization structured data "are ineligible for star review feature", and the example Google gives is a review about a business placed on that business's own site "through an embedded third-party widget". Your widget's review schema is still worth switching on: it puts the rating on the page in a form search engines can read. Stars under your own result are not what it buys.

Filtering is where a review block gets legally interesting. The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials went into effect on 21 October 2024, and its review suppression provision, 16 CFR 465.7, covers representing the reviews on a part of your site dedicated to reviews as most or all of the reviews you received, while negative ones are held back. The carve-out is the part worth designing around: a review is not suppressed if you remove it under a rule you apply to every review regardless of what it says. So pick a rule you can state in one sentence, apply it to all of them, and ask every customer rather than a screened few. None of this is legal advice, and the FTC's questions and answers is the plainer read.

One block on every page is the lazy version. Coastline Physio, a fictional practice, runs two clinics, and the same snippet on both pages is what most sites ship. Point each clinic page at that clinic's reviews instead, then keep them arriving. A block whose newest date still reads 2025 a year from now argues against you in public, so send the Google review link after each appointment. How to get more Google reviews covers the rest.

FAQ

Can I add Google reviews to Squarespace for free? Not on Basic, because JavaScript in code blocks starts at Core. Above Basic, your only cost is the widget service. Free tiers usually limit how many reviews show and leave the vendor's name on the block.

Is there a Google reviews plugin for Squarespace? No. Squarespace does not use plugins the way WordPress does, and its nearest equivalent, Extensions, had no Google reviews widget in the catalogue on 6 September 2026. A code block and a snippet is the route.

Why does my code block show the code instead of the reviews? The Type menu is set to JavaScript. Set it to HTML, and check that Display Source is switched off.

I use Wix as well. Is it the same? Close, but the block and its limits differ. Wix takes the snippet in an Embed HTML element, which is an iframe that will not resize itself, and the phone version is a second element needing its own copy of the snippet. There is a separate walkthrough for adding Google reviews to a Wix website.

How to add Google reviews to a Wix website (no app needed)

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To add Google reviews to a Wix website, paste one line of HTML into Wix's Embed HTML element. Wix cannot pull reviews from a Google Business Profile by itself. You need either an app from the Wix App Market or a snippet from a review widget service. Both give you a block on the page that refills itself as new reviews come in.

Checked on 6 September 2026 against Wix's own help centre, Google's review rich results documentation and the FTC's consumer reviews rule. The click paths below are the Wix Editor, with a note on Wix Studio further down. I could not sign in to a Wix account for this piece, so the editor screenshots are Wix's own, taken from the support articles they belong to.

Wix has no Google reviews element

Wix's own page on adding customer testimonials offers two things: preset testimonial strips under Add Elements > Strip, and repeater lists under Add Elements > List > Repeaters. You type the content into both. Its closing tip is to "open the Wix App Market and type 'Testimonials' in the search". It does not mention Google, and the Wix Editor has nowhere to enter your business name and pull back your rating.

That is why the search results for this are almost all vendors. Your choice is an app or a snippet.

Route 1: an app from the Wix App Market

You install a Google reviews app, connect your profile inside it, and drop its element on the page. The install path in Wix's own instructions is Add Apps in the editor, search, open the app, + Add to Site, then Allow and Add to confirm.

Cost is not uniform. Wix's App Market page says "some apps have both a free and premium version while others require a premium upgrade". The free tier is usually where the review count cap and the vendor's badge live.

Support is not Wix's, and billing is separate. "Wix Customer Care can only assist with apps made by Wix"; for a third-party app the contact details sit in the App developed by section of its App Market page, the price is set by its developer, and the subscription is cancelled from Subscriptions in your Wix account. Wix is direct about the rest: "It is not possible to receive a refund for an app subscription."

This route is legitimate and keeps the settings in the editor you already use. The block only exists on Wix, so moving the site means setting up the connection again.

A widget service keeps the connection to your Google Business Profile, reads the reviews on a schedule and gives you one line of HTML. Wix's Embed HTML element accepts that line.

The snippet is usually a single script tag with an id in it:

<script src="https://app.cloutly.com/add-widget-v2.js" data-widget="YOUR-WIDGET-ID" async></script>

That one is ours. Cloutly connects a Google location, gives you nine layouts and hands back a snippet for a Wix embed or any other site that accepts HTML. You can see the layouts on the review widgets page. New reviews appear in the block on their own.

Get the layout, theme and colour right here, before you go near the Wix canvas.

Keep the async attribute, whichever service you use. Without it, the browser stops building the page while it fetches the widget.

What Wix's Embed HTML element does to your widget

Most problems here come from Wix's embed element, not the widget.

It is an iframe, and it will not resize itself

Wix says it plainly in Embedding a site or a widget: "The HTML and URL elements in our editor are iFrames. Therefore, the code or site you are embedding won't be responsive, even if it is originally." Your widget sits inside the fixed box you drew on the canvas. It does not measure itself against the page.

Reviews do not all take up the same space. An element sized for a two-line review can crop a six-line one. Wix's fix, in the same article, is to "replace the px values with percentage units and set them to 100%" in the code you paste. A script-only snippet has no px values to change, so the element's height is your only control. Size it for your longest review, then check it again a month later.

HTTPS only

Wix is blunt: "Your code must contain HTTPS and not HTTP", and "only HTTPS codes and URLs are displayed". An http:// script src produces a blank box and no error message.

Wix draws the same support line around both routes: "we cannot provide support for external codes that were not created or tested by Wix". If the block is empty, contact the widget provider.

You do not need Velo, and you do not want a custom element

Wix's custom element is a different feature with a real condition attached: "For security reasons, to use the custom element, you must upgrade your site with a Premium Plan, connect a domain and have no ads on it." A review widget does not need it. Use an ordinary script tag in an ordinary embed. Dev Mode is unrelated.

Do you need a paid Wix plan to embed Google reviews?

Not for one Embed HTML element on one page. Wix's article for that element documents no plan requirement, and the element sits in the Add panel whatever you are paying.

The plan question usually comes from advice to install the widget site-wide through Settings > Custom Code in the dashboard. That advice fails for two reasons.

Custom Code cannot show a widget at all. Wix's own article says the snippets you add there are "always invisible to your site visitors", and its FAQ sends you straight back where you came from: to display visual content, add an iFrame with HTML code.

Custom Code is for analytics and verification tags. A review block is not that.

Custom Code is gated as well. It opens with "make sure that your site is published and has a connected domain", and Wix's domain article closes the loop: "to connect your domain, you must upgrade your site. If your site doesn't already have a Premium or Studio site plan, you can choose to either upgrade your site, or reassign an existing plan."

So a review block on a free wixsite.com address is fine. Adding one to every page without editing every page is not, and Custom Code cannot do it for you.

Wix added one recent caveat. "In December 2025, Wix introduced new frontend security measures for custom code on Wix sites. This means that some code snippets that previously worked may now be blocked until the provider updates them." Wix says it affects dashboard custom code, embedded code and Velo code alike. If a widget that worked last year is now a blank box, start with the provider.

How to add Google reviews to a Wix website, step by step

Build the widget first. Connect the Google location in your review service, choose a layout, set the theme and copy the snippet. It is faster to settle the look before you start publishing and previewing in Wix.
Open the page in the Wix Editor and click Add Elements on the left, then Embed Code, then Popular Embeds, then Embed HTML. Popular Embeds is an option in the middle column, not a heading. Choose Embed HTML from the column on the right. The element arrives on the canvas as an empty box.
Drag the box to where the reviews belong. On a service page, put it below the booking or enquiry button rather than at the bottom of the homepage. Reviews help where someone is deciding, not where the page happens to end.
Click the element, then Enter Code, and paste the snippet under Add your code here. The panel asks What do you want to add? and offers Website address and Code, so choose Code. Then click Apply.

Wix's article calls the button Enter Code; the panel calls the option Code. Same thing.

Write the alt text in the field labelled What's in the embed? A screen reader gets no other description, because the frame's contents are invisible to the page.
Size the box. Drag the handles until the longest review fits, then leave a little more room.
Preview, publish, and open the live site. An embed can look fine in the editor and be empty on the live page. The usual causes are the HTTPS rule, a script the preview never ran or the December 2025 change above.

Wix Studio puts it under a different menu

Studio is a separate editor with different panel names, so the Wix Editor path will send you looking for a menu that is not there. In Studio the path is Add Elements > Embed & Social > Embed Code, then Enter Code, paste, Apply (Studio Editor: Adding an HTML iFrame Element).

Studio documents one detail that the classic Editor's article leaves out: your code runs in a sandboxed iframe, with allow-scripts and allow-same-origin re-enabled among others. That lets a script-tag widget run there.

The mobile version is a second job

Do not assume the desktop block carries over. Wix's mobile embeds article says desktop embeds may display differently on a phone because "certain iFrames are designed for specific screen sizes, and may not fit or align correctly on mobile devices". Its advice is to hide the desktop version and add a mobile-friendly alternative in the mobile editor.

Anything you add in the mobile editor is mobile-only and never appears on desktop. Give it its own snippet, height and usually a narrower layout. A three-column wall that reads well at 1440 pixels becomes a column of slivers at 390. A single-column list or carousel holds up better. The mobile path is shorter: Add > Embed Code > Embed HTML, with no Popular Embeds step in between.

Keeping the block honest, and current

Check these before you publish. The parent guide on how to embed Google reviews has the full treatment. This is the short version.

Google will not give you stars in search for reviews you host about yourself, and it names widgets specifically. Its 2019 review rich results FAQ says: "Google Search won't display review snippets for those pages. Embedding a third-party widget is seen as controlling the process of linking reviews." Switching on your widget's review schema is still worth doing, because it puts the rating on the page in a form search engines can read. It will not put stars under your own result. Your Business Profile is a separate surface and is unaffected.

Do not present a filtered block as everything you have. The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials went into effect on 21 October 2024. Its review suppression provision covers misrepresenting the reviews in a part of your site dedicated to displaying reviews as most or all of what you received. The FTC's own questions and answers add an important limit: sorting five-star reviews to the top is not covered by the rule, "however, organizing reviews in a way that makes it difficult for consumers to know about or find negative reviews could be an unfair or deceptive act or practice in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act". None of this is legal advice. Use a filter you can explain in one sentence, put that sentence near the block and link to your Google profile. Ask every customer for a review, not a screened subset.

A review block can go stale where customers see it. Coastline Physio, a fictional two-clinic practice, could embed four good reviews under the Book now button on each clinic page and forget about it. A year later, the newest date still reads 2025 and the block makes the opposite case. An embed commits you to keep collecting. Send the Google review link after a job to keep the dates moving; how to get more Google reviews covers the rest.

FAQ

Can I add Google reviews to Wix for free? On one page, yes. The Embed HTML element carries no documented plan requirement, so the cost is whatever your widget service charges. Free tiers usually cap the reviews shown and keep the vendor's badge on the block.

Do I need a Wix Premium plan? Not for the embed. You need one for anything going through Settings > Custom Code, which requires a published site with a connected domain. Custom Code will not display a review block anyway, so it is rarely the reason to upgrade.

Why is my Wix embed a blank box? Check the protocol first: Wix only displays HTTPS code. Then check whether you are looking at the editor rather than the published page, and whether the element is tall enough to show anything. If a snippet worked before and stopped, ask the provider about Wix's December 2025 frontend security change.

Will the widget slow my Wix site down? It can. Third-party JavaScript loading in an iframe is often why a page that used to load quickly no longer does. Run a speed test after you add it, not before.

I use Squarespace as well. Is it the same? Close, but the surface differs. Squarespace takes the snippet in a code block rather than an iframe element, and JavaScript in a code block needs a Core plan or above. There is a separate walkthrough for adding Google reviews to Squarespace.

AI Overviews for local businesses: how to appear

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

AI Overviews are the AI-written answer Google puts at the top of some results pages, and for a business with an address the honest headline is that there is nothing new to install, submit or mark up. Google's guidance for site owners says it in one sentence: "The best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search (such as AI Overviews and AI Mode). There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." The profile, the reviews and the pages you already have are the whole lever.

For a local business, the practical question is when an AI Overview appears and what it reads when it does. Every claim below that belongs to Google is quoted from Google's own pages, checked on 6 September 2026. Where Google has not documented something, this post says so rather than guessing. This article sticks to Google's AI Overview; AI search optimization for local businesses covers all five surfaces together.

The AI Overview Google returned for "what should I look for when choosing a physio in bondi" on 6 September 2026. Source attributions have been cropped out so that no individual clinic is named.

What is an AI Overview?

An AI Overview is a summary Google writes at the top of a results page, with links to the pages it drew on. Google Search Help calls it "an AI-generated snapshot with key information and links to dig deeper". Search Central adds the purpose: they "help people get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly, and provide a jumping off point to explore links to learn more" (AI features and your website).

It is not an ad unit, so there is no placement to buy. And your customers cannot switch it off. Google's help page says AI Overviews are "a core Google Search feature, like knowledge panels. Features cannot be turned off", though a searcher can apply the Web filter after searching to see "only text-based links without features like AI Overviews" (AI Overviews in Google Search). Site owners can still control what Google takes from their own pages.

When does Google show an AI Overview for a local search?

Less often than the coverage suggests. Google's own wording is that AI Overviews "were designed to show up on queries where they can add additional benefits beyond what people might already get on Search", and, further down the same page, that they "are only shown when our systems determine that it is additive to classic Search, and as such, often don't trigger."

Here is what that looked like on 6 September 2026, from one Australian connection that Google placed at Carole Park in Queensland while I searched for a Sydney suburb.

"best physio in bondi" returned a Places block: three profiles, a map, a "Top rated" filter chip, and a quoted line from a customer review under each listing. No AI Overview.
"what should I look for when choosing a physio in bondi" returned an AI Overview with headed sections on credentials, treatment approach and local fit, a panel of three cited articles, and an "Ask anything" box underneath it. No Places block.

Two searches on one day from one location is an observation, not a rule. I ran the second one twice within a few minutes and the opening sentence came back differently each time: same shape, different wording, a different thing emphasised. One AI Overview is one sample, which is worth remembering before anyone reads a trend into a screenshot.

The pattern does line up with what Google documents. The shopping question already had a good answer in the form of three profiles, so a summary added nothing. The research question had no such answer, so it got one. The searches closest to a booking are still being answered by your Business Profile, and AI Overviews are turning up on the questions people ask before that. For the profile half, whether Google reviews affect your ranking covers the three factors Google publishes for local results.

What do AI Overviews use to answer a local question?

They run on ordinary Search. Google's guide to generative AI features describes the mechanism as retrieval-augmented generation, "a technique (also known as grounding)" that relies "on our core Search ranking systems to retrieve relevant, up-to-date web pages from our Search index" (Optimizing your website for generative AI features). Alongside it sits query fan-out, "a set of concurrent, related queries generated by the model to request more information".

So the entry requirement is the ordinary one. Search Central: "To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the Search technical requirements. There are no additional technical requirements."

Your Business Profile is named, twice. The generative AI guide has a section headed "Optimize your local business and ecommerce details" saying that "generative AI responses can include product listings, product information, and information about local businesses", and that Merchant Center and Google Business Profiles "can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results". The AI features guide repeats it as a checklist item: "Checking that your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up-to-date."

What sits behind that profile is not only what you typed into it. Google's Business Profile help says the information is compiled from publicly available sources "such as crawled web content", licensed third-party data, users who contribute facts and content, and Google's own interactions with the place (how Google sources business information).

Reviews: what is documented, and what is not. Google documents reviews as an input to local ranking. Its local ranking page puts them inside prominence and says "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." Google also documents that generative AI features are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems".

What Google has never published is a sentence saying AI Overviews read, weigh or quote your individual reviews. Not the count, not the rating, not the text. Anyone telling you how many reviews an AI Overview needs invented the number. The one Google product that does document reading review text is the Gemini API's Grounding with Google Maps tool, a developer product rather than the AI Overview on a search page. That, and the equivalent documentation from OpenAI and Perplexity, is covered in does ChatGPT recommend businesses like yours.

Is there special markup or a file for AI Overviews?

No, and Google spends a section saying so. From the mythbusting part of the generative AI guide:

You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't use them.

The same section rules out special schema.org markup and says there is no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to understand it. It also warns against the tactic usually sold next to this one, which is spinning up a page for every question variation. Creating separate content for every possible search "primarily to manipulate rankings or generative AI responses in Google Search violates Google's scaled content abuse spam policy". If an agency is quoting you for an llms.txt file, an AI-flavoured rewrite of your service pages or forty new suburb pages, that quote is for work Google says it does not use.

How to appear in AI Overviews as a local business

Start at the top of this list and work down. None of it is new.

Check you are indexed, snippet-eligible and not excluded. Indexing and snippet eligibility are the only technical requirements, and they are also how a business gets shut out by accident: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex all limit what Google can show from your pages. There is a second switch. Google's generative AI guide says a site "must be included in Search generative AI features in Search Console to be eligible for display in generative AI features on Google Search". Inclusion is the default, so most businesses have nothing to do here. Check it anyway if an agency has been in there.
Finish the Business Profile. Google's local ranking page asks for the full address, the hours including special hours, the right category and attributes like parking and Wi-Fi, and says "Businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results." Adding your business to Google Maps has the setup and verification steps.
Keep collecting reviews, and reply to them. Google's documented claim here is about local ranking rather than AI answers, and it is worth having on those terms: more reviews and positive ratings can help, and "Positive reviews and helpful replies can help your business stand out." Ask every customer, not only the ones you expect to be pleased. Google's contribution policies bar merchants from moves that "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". How to get more Google reviews covers the timing and the follow-up.
Make your details identical everywhere you are listed. Profiles are built partly from crawled web content and licensed third-party data, so an old phone number on a directory is a number Google has seen. Fixing the outliers is dull work and the highest-yield hour in this list.
Write the page that answers the question. In the AI Overview I looked at, the cited sources were articles from clinics and health providers about how to choose a physiotherapist. Not a directory, not an SEO agency's listicle. Google's guidance points the same way, asking for a "unique point of view" and contrasting commodity content, "something like '7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers'", with a piece that carries real experience. You know the questions your customers ask in the first appointment. Those are the pages.

What AI Overviews do to your clicks

Only Google has the aggregate data. In August 2025, Liz Reid, VP and Head of Google Search, published the company's position: "Overall, total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year" (AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks, 6 August 2025).

The same post concedes the obvious. For quick-answer questions, "like 'when is the next full moon,'" people "may be satisfied with the initial response and not click further", and "user trends are shifting traffic to different sites, resulting in decreased traffic to some sites and increased traffic to others." Read it for what it is: Google's account of its own product, in aggregate, with no method published. The only number that describes your site is in your own Search Console.

AI Overviews and AI Mode are not the same thing

Google says the two features behave differently: "AI Mode and AI Overviews may use different models and techniques, so the set of responses and links they show will vary."

	AI Overview	AI Mode
Where it is	At the top of an ordinary results page, when Google decides it adds something	Its own tab and its own page, entered deliberately
What it is for	Getting "to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly"	Queries "where further exploration, reasoning, or complex comparisons are needed"
Follow-ups	The AI Overview I saw offered a box to continue in	Built around them: "ask anything and get an AI-powered response, with the ability to go deeper through follow-up questions and helpful links to the web"
Your job	Identical. No additional requirements for either	Identical

The difference for a local business is who arrives. Someone who opens AI Mode and asks three questions in a row is further into a decision than someone who glanced at a summary. SEO for Google AI Mode: what a local business has to change covers that surface on its own.

How to check whether you appear in AI Overviews

Google now reports it. The generative AI performance report in Search Console "shows data about how your site performs in generative AI features on Google Search", and as of 31 August 2026 Google has "rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide". Four things to know before you read it.

It counts impressions, "how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search". There is no position or ranking figure in it.
It covers AI Overviews and AI Mode together and does not split them.
You can group it by page, country, date or device, which is how you find out which of your pages is doing the work.
It reports on your website, drawing on the Web search type in the ordinary performance report. Your Business Profile is a separate surface with its own reporting, so a strong profile and a quiet report are not a contradiction.

If the report is empty, Google names two causes worth checking: your site has not had enough impressions in generative AI features yet, or it has been excluded from them.

Search Console covers Google and nothing else. ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answer local questions from different sources and cite different pages. For those, run the same searches your customers run, from the area they are in, and read the citation list as a work list. Cloutly's AI search visibility asks those three assistants discovery questions such as "best {category} in {locality}" once a month and records whether each location was named, and it does not sample AI Overviews, so Search Console stays the record for Google's own surfaces. How to monitor AI search visibility is the procedure for checking the assistants by hand.

Frequently asked questions

Can I stop my business appearing in AI Overviews?

For your website, yes. Search Console has a Search generative AI control under Settings, rolled out to all sites on 31 August 2026. Including your site is the default; excluding it covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, takes one to two days, and costs you the impressions and traffic those features send. Google says the control "isn't used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search", so it is narrower than nosnippet and noindex, which are Search-wide and take your ordinary snippet with them. None of it governs your Business Profile. That is a separate surface and this switch does not touch it.

Do I need schema markup to appear in an AI Overview?

No. Google's wording is "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add." It is still worth having for rich results in ordinary Search, which is the reason to keep it.

Does an AI Overview replace the map pack?

Google has published nothing saying one displaces the other. In the two searches above, on 6 September 2026, they did not appear together: the profile-shopping query returned the Places block and no AI Overview, and the question-shaped query returned an AI Overview and no Places block. One day, one location. Run your own searches, from the suburb you serve, and write down what you see.

AI search optimization for local businesses: how ChatGPT, Gemini and Google decide who gets named

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

AI search optimization is the work of making sure the systems that answer a question with generated text can find, read and repeat accurate information about your business. For a business with an address, that is five surfaces: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode. None of the five publishes a ranking formula for local recommendations, and anyone quoting you one has invented it. All five do publish where their answers come from, and those sources overlap almost exactly with the things a local business was already meant to keep tidy.

In September 2026, page one for the term itself is Google's documentation, a Reddit thread and a run of agencies selling the acronym. Add "local business" to the query and the top result is a webinar listing. Almost none of it cites a primary source. This page quotes the vendors, links to what it quotes, says plainly where the documentation stops, and is the parent page for everything else we write about AI search for local business.

What AI search optimization means, and whether GEO and AEO are different

Google answers this one itself. Its guide to optimizing for generative AI features takes the two acronyms head on: "'AEO' stands for 'answer engine optimization' and 'GEO' for 'generative engine optimization'... From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."

For Google's surfaces there is no second discipline to learn. The same page, last updated in July 2026, says the generative features "are rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems". The AI features guide opens with the line worth pinning above a desk: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary."

ChatGPT and Perplexity do not run on Google's index, so there is a little more to it for them. It is still a short list, and none of it is exotic.

Grounding. Google describes retrieval-augmented generation as "a technique (also known as grounding) used to improve the quality, accuracy, and freshness of AI responses by relying on our core Search ranking systems to retrieve relevant, up-to-date web pages from our Search index". The model does not answer from memory. Something fetches pages first, and the answer is built out of what came back. Every assistant on this page works that way for a local question.

Query fan-out. Google defines it as "a set of concurrent, related queries generated by the model to request more information and fetch additional relevant search results". Its example: ask "how to fix a lawn that's full of weeds" and the fan-out queries might include "best herbicides for lawns", "remove weeds without chemicals" and "how to prevent weeds in lawn".

Fan-out is why the old habit of tuning one page to one phrase has stopped paying. "Best physio in Bondi" is not one search behind the scenes. It is several, about opening hours, about specific injuries, about parking, about who takes which health fund. A profile and a body of reviews that happen to answer six adjacent questions get retrieved more often than a page that answers one of them beautifully.

How AI search works for local businesses: the five surfaces

Surface	What happens when someone asks	Where the local facts come from	What the reader sees
ChatGPT	The question is rewritten into one or more web searches sent to search partners	Whatever those searches return, plus an approximate location from the person's IP address	Citations, a Sources list, and on iOS and Android sometimes a map
Gemini	Google Search; in the developer API, a documented Google Maps tool	Google's index; for the Maps tool, Maps itself	Inline annotations linking to Google Maps sources
Perplexity	A live search of the open web	Public pages its crawler can reach	Numbered citations on every answer
Google AI Overviews	Retrieval from Google's Search index, with query fan-out	Your indexed pages and your Business Profile	A summary with supporting links, above the ordinary results
Google AI Mode	The same, tuned for comparisons and follow-up questions	The same	A longer response with links to supporting websites

ChatGPT searches rather than remembers. OpenAI's help centre says it "can search the web to answer questions with current information and links to relevant sources" and "can also use location information to find local results" (Searching the web with ChatGPT). The rewriting is the part that surprises owners: ask "what are some good restaurants near me?" and, if ChatGPT reads San Francisco off your IP address, it "may rewrite your prompt into the search query 'top restaurants San Francisco'". What actually goes out is an ordinary local search, and the pages that come back are the raw material. Restaurants have one extra surface to think about, because the same help page says ChatGPT can show reservation times from OpenTable, Resy or Yelp. We pulled the ChatGPT half of this apart properly in does ChatGPT recommend businesses like yours.

Two lines on that page are worth reading before anyone sells you a guaranteed mention.

The second catches people out. Allowing the crawler in robots.txt is not the whole job: your host or CDN has to let OpenAI's published searchbot addresses through as well.

Gemini is the only one of the five whose documentation names reviews as an ingredient. Google's Grounding with Google Maps page describes a data retrieval step where the service "queries Google Maps for relevant information (e.g., places, reviews, photos, addresses, opening hours)", and lists place questions as the first use case.

That documentation covers the Gemini API, which is what developers build on rather than what you get in the Gemini app. Read it as the clearest published statement that review text is read, not as a description of every Gemini answer.

Perplexity is the simplest and the least about your website. Its help centre says it will "search the internet in real-time" and that "each answer includes numbered citations linking to the original sources" (How does Perplexity work?); its crawler documentation names PerplexityBot as the one to let in. For a local question the answer is assembled from whatever public pages discuss your category in your area, which is usually directories, roundups and review sites before it is you.

AI Overviews and AI Mode run on the index you already rank in. Google's eligibility rule is one sentence: a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the Search technical requirements. There are no additional technical requirements." Two other lines matter to anyone measuring this. AI Overviews "are only shown when our systems determine that it is additive to classic Search, and as such, often don't trigger", so a query that shows one today may not tomorrow. And both features use fan-out to "display a wider and more diverse set of helpful links associated with the response than with a classic web search".

One switch can shut you out of both. Since 31 August 2026 every Search Console property has a Search generative AI control under Settings. Include is the default; exclude means "you won't receive any traffic or impressions from these features". Worth two minutes to confirm nobody has touched it.

The inputs all five have in common

Six things feed a local answer on every one of those surfaces. Only some are documented, and the table says which.

Input	Who documents it	What you do about it
A complete Google Business Profile	Google, on local ranking and again in the AI features guide ("Checking that your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up-to-date")	Right primary category, real hours, every field filled
How many reviews you have, and the rating	Google: "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking"	Ask every customer, every week, not in bursts
What the reviews actually say	Google, in the Gemini Maps grounding docs	Ask at the moment the job finishes, so people describe the job
The same details on every site that lists you	Nobody publishes a weighting; ChatGPT reads whatever the web returns	Fix the directories that disagree with your profile
Pages elsewhere that mention you	OpenAI and Perplexity both describe crawling and citing public pages	Get onto the roundups and association lists the answers already cite
A site the crawlers can reach	OpenAI, Perplexity and Google all publish crawler names	Check that robots.txt and your CDN allow OAI-Searchbot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot

Review text and citations elsewhere are the two inputs local businesses often overlook.

Review text is the input almost nobody works on. Count and rating get the attention because they are visible on the profile. But nobody writes "great service" in an answer about rotator cuff rehab or emergency gas fitting. If forty of your reviews name the treatment, the technician, the breed or the machine, an assistant has forty sentences it can match against a specific question. If all forty say "highly recommend", it has none, and you are competing on star rating alone. You get that language by asking promptly, not by asking for it.

Citations elsewhere are the input you cannot buy. Perplexity will happily answer a local question without touching your website, using the directory pages and local roundups that rank for your category. Reading the citation list under an answer is the fastest work list in this whole discipline: if the same roundup is cited every month and you are not in it, that is a job with a name.

Both of those come out of ordinary review work. How to get more Google reviews covers the ask and the timing, and adding your business to Google Maps covers finishing the profile.

What does not work

Paying. Google's local ranking page states it flatly: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google." OpenAI says the same about ChatGPT's ads, which began as a US test in February 2026 and has since expanded to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and several other markets: "Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you", and an ad is "always clearly labeled as sponsored and visually separated from the organic answer" (Testing ads in ChatGPT, updated 11 August 2026). Buying the ad buys the ad.

Filtering who you ask. Sending happy customers to Google and unhappy ones to a private form is against Google's prohibited and restricted content policy, which stops merchants who "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". It also produces a review corpus that does not describe your business, which is exactly the wrong outcome when the text is being read back to a customer. Cloutly has not had a rating step in front of the review sites since 2021. Review gating is the longer version.

Asking customers to include keywords. The same policy tells merchants they should not "request that specific content be included". The template that says "please mention emergency plumbing in Newcastle" is a policy breach on the profile you can least afford to lose, in exchange for an effect no vendor has ever documented. Ask promptly instead. A customer asked the same day writes about the job they just had, and the language arrives on its own.

Writing reviews with AI. Generated review text is fabricated review text no matter who typed the prompt. Every platform that hosts reviews bans it, and it corrupts the one asset on this list that an assistant reads as evidence.

The file-and-markup tactics. Google's mythbusting section names them one by one. On llms.txt: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't use them." On rewriting: "You don't need to write in a specific way just for generative AI search." On buying mentions: "seeking inauthentic 'mentions' across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem." And on schema: "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add", though it stays worth having for rich results.

That list is specific to Google, and Google says so: keeping an llms.txt file for other services that use one "will neither harm nor help your site's visibility or rankings in Google Search". So the file is site hygiene for the non-Google assistants if you want it. It is not the lever, and an agency selling it to a plumber as one is selling the wrong thing.

Google adds a warning about the tools built on top of all this, and it applies to every vendor in the category including us: "Be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use 'internal' Google metrics. No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems."

AI answers send fewer people to your site. Being named is the point.

An assistant that answers the question well has given the customer what they came for. Some of those people will never click anything, and no vendor publishes a click-loss figure for local queries, so treat any number you are quoted as somebody's estimate rather than a measurement.

What Google does publish is the shape of what is left: "when people click from search results pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality (meaning, users are more likely to spend more time on the site)." Fewer visitors, further along.

For a business with a phone number this is less of a change than it is for a publisher. Your outcome was never a session. It was a call, a booking, a direction request or someone walking in. Being named in the answer, with the right phone number attached, does that job whether or not anyone visits your website on the way. So measure the outcome rather than the traffic, and check the naming separately.

For Google's surfaces you now have a first-party report. Search Console's Generative AI performance report was rolled out to all websites worldwide on 31 August 2026 and covers AI Overviews and AI Mode. Read it for what it is: impressions, grouped by page, country, date or device. Nothing outside Google Search appears in it, so for ChatGPT, the Gemini app and Perplexity the only honest method is still to ask them and write down what comes back.

How to get found in AI search: the monthly check

Spend ten minutes on the same day each month and write the results down. One answer is only one sample. Look for the pattern across months and the source list that keeps appearing.

Fix eight prompts and stop changing them. Mix the shapes: "best [category] in [suburb]", "[category] near [landmark] open [day]", "who should I see for [a problem you solve] in [suburb]", "is [your business] any good", "[your business] or [a rival you actually lose to]". The full set is in does ChatGPT recommend businesses like yours.
Name the location in the prompt. OpenAI's own advice when local results show the wrong area is to "include your city, neighborhood, or postal code in your question". Do not let the assistant guess it from your office connection.
Run each prompt in a fresh chat, signed out where you can be, in all three assistants. Memory and chat history change the rewritten query. Testing inside your logged-in account measures your account.
Record seven things. Whether you were named, where in the list, which rivals were named, which sources were cited, whether the phone number and hours came back right, which assistant, and the date.

Treat every result as one sample. These systems are not deterministic and a re-ask can differ, so one miss is not a verdict and one hit is not a ranking. If you would rather not run it by hand, Cloutly's AI search visibility asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity discovery questions such as "best {category} in {locality}" once a month and records whether each location was named and which rivals were.

Where to start

If you run one site, in this order:

Finish the Google Business Profile. Primary category first, then hours, then every remaining field.
Check the crawlers can reach you: robots.txt, your CDN's bot rules, and the Search generative AI control in Search Console. Blanket AI blocks were fashionable in 2023 and some are still sitting there.
Start asking every customer for a review, promptly, forever. Not a drive.
Fix the two or three directory listings that carry an old phone number or an old address.
Run the monthly check for three months before you conclude anything.

If you run a network, the order changes, because your problem is variance between sites rather than absence:

Make one location correct end to end and use it as the reference. Category, hours, description, photos.
Run the check per location, not per brand. The flagship being named tells you nothing about the suburban sites, and it is usually the suburban sites that are invisible.
Sort by worst first. A weak location drags only itself, so the return is highest where the profile is emptiest.
Get every site asking for reviews the same way, so the corpus is comparable and no location is running on a manager's memory.
Fix the details centrally. Twenty listings drifting in twenty directions is a listings problem before it is an AI problem.

Where to go deeper

The pieces below each take one part of this page further.

How it works

Does ChatGPT recommend businesses like yours? How to check
AI Overviews for local businesses: how to appear
SEO for Google AI Mode: what a local business has to change
Perplexity and Gemini answer local questions differently from ChatGPT

Measuring it

The reviews link

Do Google reviews affect ranking? What Google confirms, and what it doesn't
AI and Google reviews: do they change what AI says?
The AI summary above your reviews: where it comes from and what to do about it

The vocabulary

GEO vs SEO, AEO and LLMO: what the acronyms mean for a local business
AI visibility explained: what it measures, what it can't
Do you need an llms.txt file?

For the numbers behind any of it, AI search statistics carries a publisher, an edition and a sample on every figure.

Frequently asked questions

Does AI search replace my Google Business Profile?

No. It reads it. Google names Business Profile information in its own generative AI guidance, Gemini's Maps grounding queries Maps directly, and a ChatGPT search on a local question returns the local results your profile sits in. The profile has become more load-bearing, not less.

Which assistant should I care about most?

Nobody publishes a share of local questions by assistant, so anyone ranking them for you is guessing. Ask all three directly, watch the AI Overview on your own category search, and notice that they fail differently. ChatGPT and Perplexity miss you when you are absent from the pages they retrieve. Google's surfaces miss you when your profile is thin.

How long before any of this changes an answer?

Nobody outside the vendors can say, and it is not one lever with a lag. A review appears on your profile in a day or two. The next answer might reflect it immediately or not at all, because the answer is rebuilt from a fresh retrieval each time. Check monthly and read the trend, not the run.

Do I need a separate version of my website for AI?

No. Google warns that spinning up content for every variation of how somebody might search, done to manipulate rankings or AI responses, breaches its scaled content abuse spam policy. Write for people and organise with ordinary headings and paragraphs. The one genuine adjustment for the non-Google assistants is making sure the facts a customer needs, which for a local business means hours, address, phone, services and prices, sit in text on a page rather than inside an image or a script.

AI search visibility for multi-location brands: why the suburbs get missed

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

AI search visibility for a multi-location brand is two measurements, not one. "Best physio in Bondi" is a location question, answered from what the web and Google Maps hold about one address. "Is Coastline Physio any good" is a brand question, answered from what they hold about the whole network. A brand can pass the second at every assistant and fail the first at forty of its sites.

For a network of 20 to 400 sites, use how AI search decides which local businesses get named as the starting point. At one location the check is ten minutes a month and none of the sampling below applies.

The category itself does not make the distinction. Search "ai search visibility" today and page one is trackers: Ubersuggest, Rankscale, Semrush's free checker, a couple of scoring tools. They define the measurement the same way, as the share of AI answers that name your brand, and they all track a brand. Not one of them has a row for an address. That is a reasonable unit for a software company with one website. It is the wrong unit for a business with forty front doors.

The brand answer and the location answer are different questions

Marketing leads find this out the same way every time. Somebody asks ChatGPT about the brand, gets a warm paragraph back, and concludes the network is fine. Then a franchisee three train stops away asks for the category in their own postcode and the brand is nowhere. Both results are correct. The assistant answered two different questions out of two different piles of material.

The brand question retrieves what the web says about the name: your website, your press, roundups, aggregator pages, and the reviews of whichever sites happen to be documented well enough to surface. One answer for the whole network, mostly built out of things head office controls.

The location question retrieves what the web says about one suburb. Google defines query fan-out as "a set of concurrent, related queries generated by the model to request more information and fetch additional relevant search results to address the user's query", and for a local question those concurrent queries are about hours, parking, a health fund, whether you see children. Almost none of that lives on the brand website. It lives on one location's Business Profile, in one location's reviews, and on the listings for one address.

Gemini makes the split literal. Google's Grounding with Google Maps documentation describes a retrieval step where the service "queries Google Maps for relevant information (e.g., places, reviews, photos, addresses, opening hours)", and the tool call in Google's own sample takes a latitude and a longitude.

Maps is organised by address. There is no network row in it.

Two ways a network fails, and only one of them is obvious

A weak site drags only itself, until the brand answer picks it up

In the location answer, a weak site drags only itself. Nothing about a thin profile in Parramatta stops the Bondi site being named in Bondi.

The brand answer does not work that way. It is assembled from material about the name, and nothing makes the model prefer your best-documented site over your worst. A location carrying a disconnected phone number, an old address, a "permanently closed" flag or a 3.1 rating is part of what an assistant reads when somebody asks whether the brand is any good. One site can put a sentence into the brand answer that is true of that site and false of the other forty.

Nobody measures this, because head office only ever asks the brand question and it usually comes back clean. It comes back clean until the day retrieval happens to pull the wrong site. When AI gets your business details wrong covers tracing a wrong detail back to whatever is carrying it.

The brand is named, but the wrong branch is

The second failure is quieter and costs bookings the same week. A customer in Newtown asks for the category near them, the assistant names your brand, and it names the Bondi site because that is the address the web documents best. The customer rings a clinic forty minutes away, or more often does nothing.

No brand-level check shows you this, because the brand was named. It surfaces only when the check runs in the suburb the customer is standing in, which is the whole argument for prompting per location. The cause is nearly always the same: the suburban profile is thin, so retrieval falls back to the site with enough material to retrieve.

What gets read per location, and what gets read once for the brand

Sort the inputs by whether the thing exists once or once per site. That decides who fixes it, and how many times.

What gets read	Held per location or once for the brand	What that means for a network
Google Business Profile	Per location. Google's guidelines: "Do not create more than one page for each location of your business, either in a single account or multiple accounts"	Every site needs its own profile, complete, and only one. Google also says "businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results"
Review count and rating	Per location, on that location's profile	Google's local ranking page: "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking"
What the reviews say	Per location	Forty reviews at one site that name the service are forty sentences that site can be matched against. Forty saying "great service" are none
Directory listings	Per location, and they drift per location	Nobody publishes a weighting. A phone number that disagrees is a fault at one address, not a network fault
Your website	Once for the brand, unless you run a page per location	The one input head office fully controls. Without location pages the brand has no first-party text about any suburb
Pages elsewhere that mention you	Both. Suburb roundups are per location, trade press is brand-wide	The citation list under an answer tells you which kind is doing the work

Most of what decides a location answer is not centrally editable. Head office can mandate it, fund it and chase it, but the material sits on 200 profiles and in 200 review corpora. That makes it a governance problem, which is where the multi-location review management playbook arrives from the reviews side.

The cheapest wins are structural rather than editorial. A duplicate profile splits one location's reviews across two cards and halves the rating a customer sees, which is a retrieval problem as much as a reputation one. Multiple locations with the same name covers clearing a duplicate, and getting a location onto Google Maps properly covers the profile. Neither is glamorous and both outrank anything you could write about AI.

How to check AI search visibility across 200 locations without a full-time job

Two hundred sites, eight prompts and three assistants is 4,800 runs a month. Nobody does that by hand, and a network that tries will do it once and never again. Do not measure everything every month. Run two tracks instead.

Track one: a fixed panel, every month. Pick ten sites and do not change them. Take them from the top of whatever you already rank on, revenue or review volume, and add one or two you know are weak so the panel is not flattering. Run the eight prompts from how to monitor AI search visibility against each, same day each month, signed out, one fresh chat per prompt, suburb written into the sentence.

Ten sites, eight prompts and three assistants is 240 runs, which is about a day for one person once a month. If that is too much, cut the assistants before you cut the sites. One assistant across ten sites tells you more than three assistants across three.

Track two: every site once a quarter, on rotation. Two hundred sites over three months is roughly 67 a month, or about 17 a week. Give each site two prompts and one assistant: the plain discovery prompt for its category and suburb, and one constrained prompt built from a filter your customers apply, such as opening on a Sunday, taking a particular health fund, or seeing children. That is 34 runs a week, which is an hour.

Do not spend rotation runs on the named prompts. "Is {brand} any good" is a brand question and the panel answers it already.

Fix the sentences once and change only the values inside them. The moment somebody rewrites a prompt, the quarter stops comparing to the last one.

Use one sheet with a location column. Date, location, assistant, prompt, named or not, rivals named, sources cited, facts correct. The location column turns 200 separate checks into a network measurement, and it is the column people forget when they set this up in a hurry.

If running it by hand does not fit, Cloutly's AI search visibility asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity discovery questions such as "best {category} in {locality}" once a month and records whether each location was named and which rivals were.

How to read the results

Three things come out of the sheet, and only three are worth an executive's attention.

Named or not named, per site. Treat it as a binary and ignore where in the list you appeared. The ordinal is one sample of a system that is not deterministic, so a site that was second in September and fourth in October has told you nothing. Named in September and absent in October has told you something worth checking.

Which rivals were named. The most useful column, and the one people skip. The same rival in every suburb is a brand-level competitor whose brand-side material is better than yours, and that is a head-office job. A different rival in each suburb is normal, and it means the fight is local and the work goes to the sites.

Whether the facts came back right. A wrong phone number in an answer is worse than not being named, because the customer tried. Log it separately from the naming result and fix it at whatever source carries it, rather than by complaining to the assistant.

Report two network numbers, both carrying their denominator: how many of the sites you sampled were named by at least one assistant, and how many had a fact wrong. "31 of 67 sites named this quarter, 4 with a wrong phone number" survives being questioned. Report movement as flips rather than as a percentage. "Three sites started being named, one stopped" is defensible on one sample per site. "Share of voice up 2.4 points" is not, and somebody in the room will eventually ask what the denominator was.

The count tells you the size of the problem and nothing about where it is. At 200 locations the same proportion can mean one weak region or a thin spread everywhere, so put the count on the slide and the list of sites that missed in the appendix. Only the list can be worked.

What to do with a location that is never named

A site that misses once is noise. A site that misses in three consecutive quarters is a work list, and it is usually the same list in the same order.

You can only work 200 profiles if you can reach 200 profiles. Google's business groups are the mechanism, and the trade-off is written down: one group gives you every profile in one dashboard and one spreadsheet, several groups keep each region's people out of profiles they should not be editing and cost you the single view.

Check it has a profile, and only one. A duplicate splits the reviews and the rating across two cards, so neither card is strong enough to be retrieved. Clear it before anything else.
Finish the profile. Primary category first, then hours, the description, photos, every remaining field. One hour of work that changes more than the rest of the list combined.
Read the constrained prompt result. If "physio in {suburb} that bulk bills" names three rivals and not you, and you do bulk bill, the problem is not the assistant. Nothing public says you do.
Read the citation list. If the same suburb roundup or directory is cited every time and the site is not in it, that is a job with a name and an owner.
Get the site asking for reviews the same way as the rest of the network. A site running on a manager's memory produces a corpus nobody can match a question against. The trigger and the timing are set centrally, the wording stays local, and how to get more Google reviews covers the ask itself.
Give it two quarters. Nothing on this list moves an answer in a fortnight, and a site panicked over weekly gets worse rather than better.

One thing not to do, and it comes up at every network this size: do not filter who gets asked. Routing happy customers to the review sites and unhappy ones to a private form breaches Google's contributed-content policy, which says merchants must not "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". It also produces a corpus that does not describe the location, which is the last thing you want when a machine is reading that text back to a customer. Cloutly has not had a rating step in front of the review sites since 2021.

Reporting AI search visibility to the board

Two sources, measuring different things. Say which is which on the slide.

Google's own surfaces have a first-party report. Search Console's generative AI performance report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, and as of 31 August 2026 Google has rolled it out to all websites worldwide. Read it for what it is. It reports impressions, defined as "how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search", and nothing else. No clicks, no position. You can group by pages, countries, dates or devices.

Two things about that report bite at network scale. The usual Search Console limits apply, the 1,000-row limit included, so a 400-site network with a page per location will not see every location in one view of the page table. And nothing outside Google Search appears in it at all, so it says nothing about ChatGPT, the Gemini app or Perplexity.

Everything else is your sweep, and a sweep is a sample. Report it as the counts above, each with its denominator.

Put the caveat on the slide rather than in the speaker notes. These results are a point-in-time sample of a non-deterministic system. One sample each, and a re-ask can differ. Say that up front and the first quarter's number stays a reading instead of becoming a target.

Google adds a warning that belongs on the same slide, because it applies to every vendor in this category including us: "Be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use 'internal' Google metrics."

What not to put on the slide: a share-of-voice percentage with no stated denominator, an average across the network, and any number presented as a rank.

Frequently asked questions

Should we check AI search visibility by brand or by location?

Both, and separately. The brand check answers "what does an assistant say about us", which is one answer for the whole network. The location check answers "does an assistant name this site when somebody in this suburb asks", which is a different answer at every address. Networks that run only the brand check are usually measuring their best-documented site by accident.

Can one bad location affect how AI describes the whole brand?

In the location answer, no. A thin profile in one suburb costs that suburb and nothing else. In the brand answer, yes: a site carrying a wrong phone number, an old address or a much lower rating is part of the material an assistant reads when somebody asks about the brand by name, and nothing makes the model prefer your strongest site.

Is AI search visibility the same as our local ranking?

No. Local ranking is one of the inputs an assistant reads, not the output it produces, and an assistant can name a site that is nowhere near the map pack for the same query. Track both, separately, and do not let a rankings report stand in for the sweep.

44 AI search statistics for 2026

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

About half of US adults (49%) now use AI chatbots, Google says AI Overviews has over 2.5 billion monthly active users, and 45% of US consumers have asked an AI tool for a local business recommendation. Every figure below carries its source.

Most AI SEO statistics pages are a pile of numbers with no year on them, tracing back through three blogs to a study nobody can open. This page is the opposite. Forty-four AI search statistics. We opened every one at the publisher's own page on 6 September 2026, and every one carries its edition, its sample and a link to the source. One publisher is the exception: BrightLocal sells review software of its own, so we name it in full and do not link it. Where a publisher does not state a sample, it says so.

If you want the explanation rather than the numbers, AI search optimization for local businesses is the piece these figures sit under.

These two charts from Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact show chatbot use in 2024 and 2026, plus the tasks people use chatbots for. Pew Research Center, 17 June 2026. Screenshot taken 6 September 2026.

How many people use AI assistants for search

49% of US adults say they ever use AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, up from 33% in 2024. Pew Research Center, "Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact", published 17 June 2026, 5,119 US adults surveyed 17 to 23 February 2026.
24% use a chatbot daily, made up of 12% who use one several times a day, 8% about once a day and 4% almost constantly. Another 25% use one several times a week or less. Pew Research Center, 17 June 2026.
42% use chatbots to search for information, the most common use of all. Work tasks come second, at 38% of employed adults. Pew Research Center, 17 June 2026.
44% of US adults use ChatGPT, up from 34% a year earlier, 23% in 2024 and 18% in 2023. Pew Research Center, 17 June 2026. Read the trend with Pew's own note attached: from 2023 to 2025 the question was "Have you ever used ChatGPT?" and went only to people who had heard at least a little about it, and in 2026 it asked about other chatbots too.
Gemini is used by 24% of US adults, Copilot by 17%, Meta AI by 14%, Grok by 8%, Claude by 6% and Character.ai by 3%. Pew Research Center, 17 June 2026.
ChatGPT has more than 1 billion weekly active users, up from more than 900 million six months earlier, when OpenAI also reported more than 50 million consumer subscribers. OpenAI, "A milestone in expanding access to AI", 31 August 2026, and OpenAI, "Scaling AI for everyone", 27 February 2026.
The Gemini app has 950 million monthly active users, with daily active users tripling in the previous year. Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings call, remarks from Sundar Pichai, 22 July 2026.
Three-quarters of consumer ChatGPT conversations are practical guidance, seeking information and writing, and 49% of messages are classified as "Asking" rather than task completion. OpenAI and Harvard's David Deming, "How people are using ChatGPT", a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published 15 September 2025, from a privacy-preserving analysis of 1.5 million conversations on consumer plans.

The most common thing people do with an assistant is ask it something they would once have typed into a search box.

How many people use AI for local business recommendations

The public record is thinnest here and it is the part a business with an address actually needs. One current survey covers it properly.

45% of consumers used an AI tool to get a local business recommendation in the past year, up from 6% a year earlier. BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US consumers).
31% used ChatGPT specifically for a business recommendation in the last 12 months. BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 AI trust analysis (published 10 March 2026, 1,002 US consumers).
23% used Google's AI Mode for a business recommendation, putting it second behind ChatGPT. BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 AI trust analysis (10 March 2026, 1,002 US consumers).
42% trust AI platforms for local recommendations as much as they trust reviews. BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US consumers).
97% of the consumers who use AI for recommendations at least sometimes check the answer against real reviews. BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 AI trust analysis (455 AI users).
82% of consumers read AI-generated review summaries. BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US consumers).

Then there is the practitioner view. Whitespark asked 47 local search experts to score 187 factors, separately for the local pack and for AI search visibility, and the two lists disagree in a way that is easy to miss.

The presence of a business on expert-curated "best of" and similar lists ranks 1st of 187 factors for AI search visibility. Whitespark, 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors, published 6 November 2025, 47 local search experts.
The authority of the third-party sites a business's reviews sit on ranks 5th, high numerical Google ratings rank 8th, and the diversity of sites carrying a business's reviews ranks 11th. Whitespark, 6 November 2025.
A dedicated page for each service ranks 2nd, prominence on key industry-relevant domains 3rd, and a scannable content structure across the whole website 10th. Whitespark, 6 November 2025.

On the local pack list the top two factors are the primary Google Business Profile category and proximity to the searcher, and neither has anything to do with reviews. On the AI list, four of the top eleven are about where else on the web your business and its reviews appear. Whether reviews change what an assistant actually says is a narrower question with a narrower answer, and do reviews affect AI search separates what is documented from what is guesswork.

18% of the Google searches in Pew's browsing panel produced an AI summary, and 58% of the panel saw at least one during the month. Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025, 68,879 searches run by 900 US adults who agreed to share their browsing, collected in March 2025.
60% of US adults say they ever read the AI summaries at the top of search results. 30% say they do not and 10% are not sure. Pew Research Center, 17 June 2026, 5,119 US adults.
AI Overviews has over 2.5 billion monthly active users. Google, "New opportunities, control and insights for website owners", 3 June 2026.
AI Mode passed one billion monthly users within a year of launch, with queries "more than doubling every quarter since launch". Google, "A new era for AI Search", 19 May 2026.
80% of the desktop keywords that triggered an AI Overview were informational, transactional keywords were under 3% of all AI Overview triggers, and 82% of desktop AI Overviews appeared on keywords with fewer than 1,000 monthly searches. Semrush AI Overviews study, published 22 July 2025, 200,000 keywords (100,000 desktop, 100,000 mobile) sampled 1 to 10 September 2024. Dated. It is the only published intent breakdown of that size, and the AI Overview has changed a great deal since the sample was taken.

Two of those numbers get conflated constantly. Pew's 18% is the share of one panel's real searches that returned a summary in March 2025. Google's 2.5 billion is a user count, not a query share. Neither tells you how often an AI Overview appears on the terms your own customers use, which you can only get by looking. AI Overviews for local businesses covers how to check your own.

What AI answers do to clicks

Users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits, against 15% of visits where no summary appeared. Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025.
They clicked a link inside the summary itself on just 1% of visits. Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025.
They ended the browsing session outright on 26% of pages carrying an AI summary, against 16% of pages without one. Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025.
The presence of an AI Overview correlates with a 58% lower average clickthrough rate for the top-ranking page, worse than the 34.5% the same team measured in April 2025. Ahrefs, "Update: AI Overviews reduce clicks by 58%", 4 February 2026, 300,000 keywords split evenly between those with and without an AI Overview, comparing December 2023 with December 2025.
The effect shrinks down the page: 58% at position one, 50.8% at position two, 46.4% at position three and 19.4% at position ten. Ahrefs, 4 February 2026.

Google's own position is two claims, neither of them comparable with the studies above. On the Q2 2026 earnings call it said it is "now sending billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features in Search" (Alphabet, 22 July 2026) without publishing a denominator, and its documentation says that when people click from a results page carrying an AI Overview, "these clicks are higher quality (meaning, users are more likely to spend more time on the site)" (Google Search Central, AI features and your website, updated 10 December 2025). Nobody outside Google can check either one, which is worth saying rather than repeating them as findings.

Which sources AI answers cite

88% of AI summaries cited three or more sources and 1% cited a single source, with a median summary length of 67 words. Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025.
37.9% of the URLs cited in AI Overviews also appear in the first ten results on the same search. 31.2% sit between 11 and 100, and 31% do not appear in the top 100 at all. Count organic blue links only and the non-ranking share rises to 36.7%. Ahrefs, "Update: 38% of AI Overview citations pull from the top 10", 2 March 2026, 863,000 keyword SERPs and 4 million AI Overview URLs from Ahrefs Brand Radar.
The most-cited domains in AI Overviews are youtube.com at 22.9%, reddit.com at 18.5%, facebook.com at 10.1%, google.com at 8.8%, instagram.com at 5.6%, quora.com at 4.7% and en.wikipedia.org at 4.0%. The denominator matters: Ahrefs calls this mention share, meaning a domain's citations as a percentage of the citations collected by the 50 most-cited sources, not of every citation. Ahrefs, "The 50 most-cited websites in Google AI Overviews (September 2026)", published 2 September 2026, over 3 million US queries.
YouTube URLs account for 5.6% of all AI Overview citations and 18.2% of the citations that do not rank in the top 100. Ahrefs, 2 March 2026.

Nearly a third of citations come from pages that do not rank at all, and the domains at the top of the list are platforms other people post on rather than company sites. It supports the same finding Whitespark reported.

How Google's AI Mode is rolling out

Every total in this section was superseded within months, so it is a chronology and the older entries are milestones rather than current facts.

28 October 2024. AI Overviews "will begin rolling out in more than 100 countries and territories around the world", which Google said at the time would give it "more than 1 billion global users every month". Google, "AI Overviews in Search are coming to more places around the world". The billion is a forecast in that post, not a measurement.
5 March 2025. AI Mode launches as an early, opt-in Labs experiment in the US, offered first to Google One AI Premium subscribers. Google, "Expanding AI Overviews and introducing AI Mode".
21 August 2025. AI Mode expands "to over 180 new countries and territories in English". Google, "AI Mode in Search gets new agentic features and expands globally".
19 May 2026. Personal Intelligence in AI Mode expands "to more people in nearly 200 countries and territories across 98 languages", with no subscription required. Google, "A new era for AI Search".
22 July 2026. "Since expanding AI Mode globally last October, we've surpassed 1 billion monthly active users." Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings call.

What businesses are doing about AI search

Google finished rolling out its AI-features controls and reporting to all websites worldwide on 31 August 2026. Site owners get a Search Console toggle deciding whether their site can appear in and ground generative AI responses, plus impression and geography data for AI answers. Google, "New opportunities, control and insights for website owners", published 3 June 2026 and updated 31 August 2026.
Sites appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted inside the existing "Web" search type in Search Console, not in a separate AI report. Google Search Central, updated 10 December 2025.
Google says no new files or markup are needed. Its words: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search", and on llms.txt specifically, "Google Search ignores them". Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features, updated 10 July 2026.
28% of domains now publish a valid llms.txt file. Ahrefs llms.txt study, published 15 June 2026, 137,210 domains using Ahrefs Web Analytics in May 2026.
97% of those llms.txt files received zero requests in May 2026. Of the requests that did arrive, 96% came from bots and 19.5% from AI bots, and no AI bot went looking for an llms.txt file that did not exist. Ahrefs, 15 June 2026.
Adding schema markup did not increase AI citations. Citations in AI Overviews fell 4.6%, a drop the authors call statistically significant; AI Mode rose 2.4% and ChatGPT 2.2%, both indistinguishable from zero. In a separate look at 6 million URLs, 53% of AI-cited pages carried JSON-LD, making them almost three times more likely to have it than uncited pages, which is a correlation the experiment did not reproduce. Ahrefs schema and AI citations study, published 11 May 2026, a matched difference-in-differences design over 1,885 treated pages against 4,000 controls, August 2025 to March 2026.
Searches for the vocabulary grew faster than the evidence for it: "generative engine optimization" up 997% and "geo vs seo" up 982% over eighteen months, with "AI search tracking" up 184%. Ahrefs, "5 AI search trends I'm seeing in 2026", 24 July 2026, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, US volumes.
ChatGPT Ads reached $1 billion in annualised revenue run rate in under 200 days and is available in more than 40 countries, with Ads Manager opening the platform to small and medium-sized businesses in May 2026. OpenAI, 31 August 2026.

Demand for a technique is running well ahead of the evidence that any technique works. The published evidence still points to ordinary search fundamentals and mentions of your business elsewhere on the web. If you want to know where you stand today rather than in aggregate, how to monitor AI search visibility is a procedure you can run by hand in ten minutes, and does ChatGPT recommend businesses like yours covers what one good answer does and does not prove.

How these AI SEO statistics are checked

We opened every figure above at its publisher's own page on 6 September 2026. Nothing here comes from another statistics roundup, and nothing appears without a publisher, an edition or date, and the sample where the publisher states one.

Four rules govern what gets in.

A figure has to be readable at source. If the study is gated, unlinkable or has moved, it does not go on the page. If the number is a count we made by tallying a list rather than a figure the publisher printed, it does not go on either.
Nothing sampled before 2025, unless it is the only published figure on a point that matters. One figure qualifies, the Semrush intent breakdown taken from September 2024 keywords, and it is marked Dated. The rollout chronology is a deliberate exception: those entries are milestones and each one carries its date.
Publisher, edition, sample. Where a publisher does not state a sample, we say so rather than fill it in.
One link per figure, to the primary source, unless the publisher is a competitor of ours. BrightLocal sells review software, so we cite its figures by publisher, edition and sample and do not link them. Everything else is linked.

Two things about the numbers as a set. Vendor figures and independent figures answer different questions: Google and OpenAI report their own user counts and have every reason to report them, while Pew measures real browsing on a recruited panel and Ahrefs measures its own crawl of search results. Neither kind substitutes for the other, so they are kept apart. And almost every consumer figure here is US-only, which is why the samples are stated. There is no equivalent Australian or New Zealand panel study of AI search behaviour that we could open, and we would rather say so than borrow a US number and call it local.

The review side of the same picture lives on online review statistics, which is maintained to the same rules.

Last checked: 6 September 2026. Next check: December 2026. This page is re-checked every quarter. Figures whose source has moved or been withdrawn come off, superseded editions get replaced, and the date above changes. If a number here is wrong or out of date, tell us and it gets fixed rather than left.

We keep this page current because Cloutly's AI search visibility asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity discovery questions such as "best {category} in {locality}" once a month and records whether each location was named, and one sample of a non-deterministic system is exactly as much as that is worth.

AI search visibility tools: what they measure and how to choose

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

AI search visibility tools all do the same four things. They put a fixed list of questions to the AI assistants on a schedule, record whether your business was named and which rivals were, repeat the run so you can compare this month against last, and turn the count into a percentage. What separates one from another is which assistants it asks, how often, whether it can ask per location rather than per brand, whether it checks that the facts in the answer are right, and whether it will show you the arithmetic behind the number.

Cloutly publishes this page, and Cloutly sells one of the tools on it. That is the disclosure, and it belongs up here rather than in a footnote. Every fact about another vendor comes from that vendor's own public pages, read on 6 September 2026, and where a vendor does not publish something this page says so instead of borrowing a figure from a comparison blog. There is no "cheaper than" anywhere below, because these products are not priced in the same unit and the arithmetic would be dishonest. The tools are listed alphabetically. If a vendor's site says something different today, the vendor's site is right and this page is stale.

The category also gets sold as AI visibility tools, GEO tools, AEO platforms or a ChatGPT visibility tracker. The labels move faster than the products do. Read the specification instead.

Cloutly's own plans page, read on 6 September 2026. Cloutly publishes this post and is one of the six tools compared in it.

What AI search visibility tools actually do

The whole category is a sampler with a spreadsheet attached. It runs your prompts, stores the answers, and counts.

That matters because of what sits underneath. An assistant asked the same question twice can name a different set of businesses, so no tool here is reading a ranking. Each one samples something that moves and presents the average as a number, and a product reporting a stable rank is presenting a sample as a fact. AI visibility explained has the arithmetic, including why two tools pointed at the same business in the same week disagree. This page is the buying decision on top of it.

Read Google's guidance before you spend anything. Its guide to optimising for generative AI features carries a warning box: "Be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use 'internal' Google metrics. No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems." That is not an argument against buying one. It is the standard to hold a vendor to.

Six questions that decide which AI search visibility tool you buy

Ask these on the call. Most can be answered from a pricing page before you book anything.

1. Which assistants does it ask?

Get the list, not the count. "10+ AI platforms" is a number that includes Grok, Meta and Mistral, and if your customers ask ChatGPT and Gemini then eight of the ten are padding.

Ask which assistants come with the plan you are quoted, because coverage is the most common upsell here. Profound's entry plan tracks ChatGPT and nothing else. AIclicks lets you pick three models from a list of eleven, and the fourth is the next tier up. Nightwatch is the exception, with the same six on every plan.

Then ask how the tool reaches the assistant. SE Ranking is the only one of the six that answers in public: "SE Ranking's AI Search Toolkit retrieves results through direct UI-based monitoring. It sends queries to AI platforms and captures the responses as a real user would see them." A model reached by API is not always the model your customer sees in the app.

2. How many prompts, how often, and how many samples of each?

Three numbers, and vendors usually publish the first two.

Prompt count is what you are buying. Fifty prompts is one business with a good list of questions; five hundred is a network. Frequency is how quickly you get a trend, and every tool below runs daily on some plan. The third number is the one to say out loud: how many times is each prompt asked, per assistant, per month? Vendors who publish a monthly response allowance beside the prompt count are telling you indirectly, so divide. Nightwatch's Starter is 50 prompts against 1,500 answers; Profound's is 50 against 1,500.

Watch the entry tiers on the platform products. Ahrefs includes AI prompts in every paid plan, but Lite carries five of them and 150 checks a month, which is a taste rather than a programme.

3. Does it work per location, or only per brand?

This question eliminates most of the category for a business with addresses, and nobody asks it in the demo.

A brand-level tool measures whether the assistants talk about your company. A location-level tool measures whether they name your Parramatta site when somebody in Parramatta asks. Passing the first tells you almost nothing about the second. Coastline Physio can be described warmly by every assistant on earth and still be absent from "best physio in Bondi" at nine of its eleven clinics.

So ask what the geographic unit is. It is usually nothing at all, a country, or a place you can name. Ahrefs bills a check as one prompt on one platform in one location. Nightwatch advertises prompts tracked in any location. Profound counts regions, and both published plans include one. AIclicks counts countries per project. A country is not a suburb, and for a service business the suburb is the whole question. AI search visibility for multi-location brands covers why the flagship gets named and the suburbs do not.

4. Does it check whether the answer is right, or only whether you were in it?

Being named in an answer that gives out a phone number you gave up two years ago is worse than not being named, because the customer rings the number.

Most tools here score presence and sentiment. Accuracy is rarer: of the six below, five document no accuracy check anywhere public, and ours checks one field, the phone number. Ask anyway, because the answer tells you what the product is for. If the tool does not check, the check is manual and belongs in your log. When AI gets your business details wrong is what you do once you find one.

5. Will it show you the denominator?

Every product here reports a share-of-voice or visibility percentage, and the percentage means nothing until you know what it is a percentage of.

Ahrefs publishes its definition plainly: AI Share of Voice is "the percentage of AI responses within your topic set that mention or cite your brand versus competitors". That sentence is usable, because it tells you the denominator is your topic set and therefore yours to change. Profound describes its method but publishes no formula behind any score.

The consequence is practical. Add three prompts your rivals happen to win and your score falls with nothing changed about your business. Ask what counts toward the number, whether custom prompts feed it, and whether movement is reported in percentage points or as a count of prompts that flipped. A score you cannot reconstruct is a score you cannot act on.

6. What does the price move with?

The billing units here are the plan, the check and the location. Per-plan pricing is a flat fee with a prompt allowance, predictable until you hit the ceiling. Per-check pricing, where one check is one prompt on one platform in one location, gets expensive at scale in a way you can forecast on a napkin. Per-location pricing tracks the thing you are measuring, which suits a network and is unnecessary for one shop.

Ask what the bill looks like at location twenty before you sign anything, and ask whether AI visibility sits on the tier you are being quoted or the one above it.

Best AI visibility tracking tools: what six vendors publish

Six tools, listed alphabetically. Five are products Google returns for this search; the sixth is ours. Every cell comes from the vendor's own public pages, read on 6 September 2026, and where a vendor does not publish something, this table says so.

Tool	Best suited to	AI assistants covered	Location handling	Price published?	Free trial
Ahrefs (Brand Radar)	SEO teams who want AI visibility alongside a search index	AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot; Claude on custom prompts	Yes, as a billing dimension: "Tracking one prompt on one platform in one location uses 1 check"	Yes, in USD, on the pricing page	No trial. "We never run discounts"; a free AI Visibility Checker and a free tier exist
AIclicks	Agencies tracking many client brands cheaply	Choose 3 to 6 from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Claude, Copilot, AI Mode, Grok, Meta, DeepSeek, Mistral	Countries per project: 1 on Starter, unlimited above	Yes, in USD, on the pricing page	3 days on Starter and Pro, no credit card
Cloutly	Service businesses measuring each location, alongside their reviews	ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Not Copilot, not AI Mode	Per location. Questions are asked for each site and the league table ranks sites	Yes, per location, in the visitor's currency, on `/plans`	14 days, no card, starts on an email
Nightwatch	Teams who want AI prompts and rank tracking in one tool	ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overview, on every plan	Yes: prompts "tracked daily, in any location or language", across "107,000+ locations"	Yes, in euros, on the pricing page	14 days, no credit card
Profound	Marketing teams at brands with a national or global footprint	ChatGPT only on Starter; three engines on Growth; up to nine on Enterprise	Regions: 1 on Starter, 1 on Growth, custom on Enterprise	Yes, in USD, for two of three tiers	"Try for free" on Growth; no trial length published
SE Ranking	Agencies who need GEO reporting inside an SEO platform	ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews, per its FAQ	Not published. The AI visibility page describes no city, country or market unit	Yes, in USD, with AI tracking sold partly as an add-on	14 days, no credit card

Read the price column with the units in mind. One of these bills per check, one bills per location, and the rest bill per plan with a prompt allowance. The digits are not comparable and lining them up would mislead you.

Ahrefs

Brand Radar is the most transparent product here about how its numbers are built. Its FAQ defines the four metrics it leads with, and it says out loud where the index is weak: it "works best for established brands or topics with meaningful search demand, since the index is built on Ahrefs' keyword database and may have limited coverage for brands with little or no search volume". A suburban physiotherapy clinic is exactly that case.

It is also the only per-check model here. Plans run from US$129 a month (Lite) to US$1,499 (Enterprise, annual commitment required), each with a prompt allowance: five prompts and 150 checks on Lite, twenty and 600 on Advanced. Brand Radar sells standalone from US$199, and prompt packages start at US$50 for 2,500 checks, so a multi-location sweep prices out exactly. No contracts and no trial: asked about discounts, Ahrefs answers "We never run discounts" and points site owners at its free tier.

AIclicks

AIclicks scales on prompts and models rather than seats. Starter is US$59 a month for 30 tracked prompts, three models and one country per project; Pro is US$189 for 150 prompts, four models and unlimited countries; Business is US$499 for 300 prompts and six models. Prompts run daily on all three, and every plan publishes a monthly response allowance beside the prompt count.

Its FAQ is straight about what drives the bill: "Pricing is based on three things: the number of prompts you track, the number of AI engines monitored, and the volume of AI answers analyzed per month." Trials are three days, no credit card. The geographic unit is the country and the pricing page describes nothing smaller, which is fine for an agency and wrong for one business across eleven suburbs.

Cloutly

Our own scope, stated the way the product states it. Cloutly's AI search visibility asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity discovery questions such as "best {category} in {locality}" once a month, and records whether each location was named and which rivals were. There is an on-demand check across all three with a daily allowance. It does not sample Copilot or Google AI Mode.

The unit is the location. Each site gets its own questions and its own row, and the league table sorts worst first. Share of voice counts the standard questions only, and movement between sweeps is reported as flips: how many locations gained a mention and how many lost one. The fact check reads the phone number and nothing else. Results are a point-in-time sample of a system that is not deterministic, one sample each, so a re-ask can differ.

Pricing is published per location on our plans page, in the visitor's own currency, and reads US$39, US$55 and US$69 today, with 14 days free and no card. AI search visibility sits on the Growth plan, the US$69 one, where the inclusion line names ChatGPT and Gemini and the sweep also covers Perplexity. There is no content optimisation, no crawler analytics, no prompt research and no Grok, because this is one instrument inside a review management product rather than an AEO workbench.

Nightwatch

Nightwatch is a rank tracker that added AI prompts, and its location handling is why it is on this list. Every plan carries the same six AI platforms, and prompts are "tracked daily, in any location or language" across what the pricing page calls "107,000+ locations across 190+ countries".

Plans are Starter at €79 a month for 50 AI prompts and 1,500 AI answers, Professional at €159 for 150 and 4,500, and Agency at €399 for 500 and 15,000, all with a 14-day trial and no credit card. Sentiment and citation analysis sit on every plan, but the compare table puts white-label reports, API access and unlimited seats on Professional and above, which is worth reading against the "no per-seat fees" line at the top. Prices are in euros, and it is a rank tracker first, so you buy keyword tracking to get the prompts.

Profound

Profound is the most enterprise-shaped product here. Starter is US$99 a month and tracks ChatGPT only, with 50 prompts and 1,500 responses. Growth is US$399 for three answer engines, 100 prompts and 9,000 responses. Enterprise is custom and opens up to nine engines. Prompts run daily on all three tiers, and a "billed yearly" toggle offers two months free.

Its FAQ describes the method in one line: "Profound runs structured prompts across AI platforms daily, analyzing where and how your brand appears in responses, tracking citations, sentiment, ranking, and competitive presence." What it does not publish is the formula behind any score, so question five is live on the sales call.

The line to read carefully is Regions: one on Starter, one on Growth, custom on Enterprise. Languages are the same. For a national brand asking national questions, one region is right. For eleven clinics in eleven suburbs, you are in the Enterprise conversation before you start.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking sells AI visibility inside an SEO platform, and it is the most explicit of the six about collection method, quoted in question one. Its FAQ says the toolkit analyses ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews. It is also the only vendor here that answers the question buyers actually have about their score: "There's no benchmark yet as AI search is too new for the industry."

Plans are Core at US$129 a month and Growth at US$279, both with 14-day trials and no credit card, listing 100 and 250 prompts to track daily. A separate AI Search add-on is US$89 a month for 200 prompts and competitor research; whether those prompts stack with the in-plan allowance or replace it is not stated, so confirm it on the call. The free checker gives five checks a day with no account. On location it says nothing a service business can use: no city, country or market unit at all.

Do the free checks before you buy anything

Two of these cost nothing and will tell you whether you need a subscription.

Google publishes AI performance data to the people who own the site. Its guide sends you to the Generative AI performance report in Search Console to see "how people are discovering your content through generative AI features on Google Search". It is first-party, it is free, and no third-party tool has better access to it than you do.

Then run the vendors' free checkers. Ahrefs runs one with no signup, and SE Ranking gives five checks a day without an account. Neither gives you a series, because one check is one sample, but in ten minutes they will tell you whether the assistants name you at all. If the answer is a flat no, buying a dashboard to watch a zero is an expensive way to feel busy. How AI search decides which local businesses get named is the work list then.

When a spreadsheet is enough

Use this test before you buy one.

You do not need a tool yet if you have one or two locations, you can write down eight prompts your customers would actually type, and you will spend twenty minutes on the first of every month. How to monitor AI search visibility is the procedure: eight prompts, a signed-out assistant, a fresh chat for each, and a seven-column log of whether you were named, which rivals were, what was cited and whether the facts were right. Doing it by hand has one advantage no dashboard matches, which is that you read the answers.

What breaks it is arithmetic. Eight prompts across three assistants is 24 answers a month at one location and 264 at eleven, and nobody does 264 by hand twice. The other thing that breaks it is a person: if the check depends on whoever remembers, it stops in the third month. When either is true you are buying automation, and you should price it as automation.

How to run a trial that tells you something

Two weeks is plenty if you decide beforehand what you are testing. Most trials here get spent admiring the dashboard.

Enter your real prompts on day one, not the ones the tool suggests. Discovery questions with no brand name in them, per location. A tool scored on brand-name prompts flatters everybody.
Check the geographic unit immediately. Set one prompt to a suburb rather than a country and see whether the answer changes. If it does not, the tool is not asking a local question.
Ask the same prompt twice in one day, once through the tool and once by hand. That is the sampling noise you will be reading all year, and you want its size before you start reacting to it.
Open one answer in full. If you cannot read the paragraph the assistant actually wrote, you are buying a number rather than a finding.
Ask support for the denominator in writing. A vendor who cannot answer that in a sentence has not decided.
Add a second location and see whether the price moves the way you expected and whether reporting rolls up or leaves you exporting.

On the last day, ask what you would have done differently because of the tool. If the honest answer is "nothing", the spreadsheet was the right product.

Questions people ask

What is the best AI search visibility tool? There is no single answer, because these tools are priced and scoped for different buyers. The question that narrows it fastest is whether you need per-location measurement. If you do, most of the category is out immediately, because it counts countries or nothing at all.

How do I check my AI visibility for free? Search Console's Generative AI performance report covers Google's AI features for a site you own. For the assistants, several vendors run free checkers, including Ahrefs with no signup and SE Ranking at five checks a day. And you can ask the assistants yourself: eight prompts, signed out, a fresh chat each time.

Are AI visibility tools accurate? They are accurate about what they observed, which is not the same as being accurate about your position. Each answer is one sample of a system that can reply differently minutes later, so a single result is evidence and a trend over months is a measurement.

How much do AI search visibility tools cost? The published monthly prices among the six above run from US$50 for a prompt package to US$1,499 for an enterprise plan, with one vendor priced in euros and ours priced per location, at US$69 a location a month for the tier that carries AI search visibility. Compare what a month of measurement costs at your number of locations, not the headline.

Do I need a GEO tool if I already do local SEO? Not necessarily, and Google's position is that the underlying work is the same. What a tool adds is the observation: whether the assistants name you, at which addresses, and what they are reading when they do.

AI visibility explained: what it measures, what it can't

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

AI visibility is how often, and how accurately, an AI assistant names your business when a customer asks it a question you want to be the answer to. It counts four things: whether you were named, whether you were cited, whether the facts were right, and how you compared with rivals.

It is a measurement, not a ranking, and none of it is guaranteed. This is the vocabulary page for how AI search decides which local businesses get named: what the term means, how a score gets built, and where the measurement stops being reliable.

The term arrived with the tools, not with anything Google or OpenAI published, which is why it gets used so loosely. Search it and the top of page one is software: a free report, an analytics dashboard, a tracker. SE Ranking's own FAQ answers the obvious question, what counts as a good score, with the line most of its rivals leave out: there is no benchmark yet, because AI search is too new for the industry to have set one.

What AI visibility measures

Four results come out of one answer, and they fail for different reasons.

Named or not. The binary, and the one that matters. A customer asks for the best physio in their suburb and gets a shortlist of five. You are on it or you are not, and nothing else here counts until you are.

Cited or not. Whether your own pages were among the sources shown. Being named without being cited is common and not a fault: the assistant read a directory page, a roundup or your Google Business Profile and never touched your website. The citation list is the more useful half of the screen, because it names the pages deciding your category.

Facts right or not. The phone number, the hours, whether you bulk bill. An answer that names you and hands out a number you disconnected in 2023 is worse than no answer at all, and you never hear about it.

Share against rivals. Of the answers you sampled, how many named you, and who was named instead. This is the only one of the four that comes out as a number, which is why the tools lead with it.

An owner asking whether they are visible in AI means the first. A tool selling AI visibility means the fourth. Most of the confusion here sits in that gap.

What it is not

It is not a ranking. An assistant's list has an order, and that order is real for the answer in front of you, but it is not a position you hold. It moves with the phrasing, with the location the assistant inferred, and on a re-ask. Read it as one sample with an ordinal attached. Google's local ranking guidance closes off the shortcut as well: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."

It is not a traffic number either. An assistant that answers well has given the customer what they came for, so a rise in AI visibility need not show up in your sessions at all. Your outcome was never a session. It was a call, a booking, someone walking in. Measure it there and treat visibility as the leading indicator.

AI visibility vs SEO

For Google's own AI features the work is the same work, and Google says so itself in the guide quoted in the next section. What differs is the thing being measured, and the two numbers behave nothing alike.

	Traditional SEO	AI visibility
What is measured	A position for a query, on a page of results	Whether a generated sentence names you
Stability	Moves over days and weeks	Can differ on a re-ask, minutes apart
First-party reporting	Search Console, per query and page	Google's surfaces only, and impressions only
What counts as a win	Being on the page	Being named in the sentence, with the right details

Google provides first-party reporting for its own surfaces and nobody else does. Search Console's generative AI performance report, live for all websites worldwide since 31 August 2026, counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. For ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity there is no equivalent, which is why this gets measured with a log or a tool rather than a dashboard you already own.

AEO, GEO and AI visibility name the same work

Google takes the acronyms on directly in its guide to optimizing for generative AI features, last updated 10 July 2026: "AEO stands for 'answer engine optimization' and GEO for 'generative engine optimization'... From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."

The same page closes off the tactics usually sold alongside them. On files and markup: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't use them." On style: "You don't need to write in a specific way just for generative AI search."

AEO and GEO name the work, and Google says the work is SEO. AI visibility names what you measure afterwards. If somebody quotes you a GEO retainer on top of an SEO retainer, ask which line item is not already SEO. What the acronyms mean for a local business has the longer version.

What an AI visibility score is, and how it is calculated

Every score in this category is built the same way, whatever it is called.

A prompt set. A fixed list of questions, chosen by whoever set the tool up.
A set of assistants, in whatever combination the tool covers: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, AI Mode.
A run. Each prompt asked once, or a handful of times, per assistant, per period.
A count. How many of those answers named you.
A percentage, sometimes weighted by where in the list you appeared, sometimes by whether your own site was cited.

The arithmetic is worth doing once by hand. Eight prompts, three assistants, once a month, is 24 answers. Named in nine of them is a score of 37.5%. Weight a first mention above a fifth and the same 24 answers give a different number. Add a ninth prompt your rivals happen to win and the score drops with nothing changed about your business.

That is the limit of what it carries: a direction, for one business, over several months, as long as the questions stay identical. It cannot carry a level, because the denominator is yours. A vendor quoting you an industry benchmark has invented it.

Cloutly's AI search visibility ranks each location by share of voice, counted from the standard questions only, since custom queries do not feed it. Movement between sweeps is reported as flips, meaning locations that improved and locations that lost, never as a change in share points.

Why two tools give you two different scores

Run two trackers on the same business in the same week and the scores disagree. Four reasons, none of them a bug, and what the tools actually measure covers how to choose between them.

The prompts are different. There is no standard set. One tool asks discovery questions, another asks about your brand by name, and brand-name prompts score far higher, because an assistant asked about you will talk about you. Two tools asking different questions are measuring different things and calling both visibility.

The sample size is different. One answer per prompt per month, or ten. Every extra sample costs the vendor money and steadies the number, so each picks a point on that trade-off and few publish where they landed. Ask before you compare anything.

The model is different, even inside one assistant. Google's AI Mode help page describes a Pro option running Gemini 3 Pro next to the Fast model that handles most questions, and you have to be signed in to a personal Google account to choose it. A tool querying an API is not necessarily reaching the model your customer sees in the app.

The system is not deterministic. The same help page tells searchers to "ask multiple versions of your question to get the best answers", because AI Mode splits a question into subtopics and searches each of them separately. Read that as an admission: the answer to one phrasing is not the answer to the question. A tracker that asks once has sampled once, and the location and the account it asked from move the result again, which how to monitor AI search visibility works through in detail.

Google's warning about the tools built on all this applies to every vendor here, us included: "Be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use 'internal' Google metrics. No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems."

How to measure AI visibility without a tool

With one or two locations, use a log rather than buy a tool.

Write eight questions a customer would type, covering plain discovery, a constraint, a problem, your business name and you against a rival. Then stop changing the sentences.
Ask each in a fresh chat, signed out where the assistant allows it, with the suburb in the wording.
Record four things: were you named, who else was, what was cited, were the phone number and hours right.
Same day each month. Read the series, not the run.

The full procedure, with the eight prompt shapes, the private-mode setting each vendor documents and a seven-column log, is in how to monitor AI search visibility.

What moves AI visibility

AI visibility moves with ordinary local-search inputs: a complete Google Business Profile, a review count and rating that keep growing, reviews whose text describes the actual job, the same phone number and hours everywhere you are listed, pages elsewhere that mention you, and a site the crawlers can reach. The parent piece sources each item and gives the order to work in.

The one a review vendor can speak to rather than an SEO is the text. Nobody writes "great service" in an answer about rotator cuff rehab, so a profile whose reviews all say "highly recommend" gives an assistant nothing to match against a specific question. Whether reviews change what AI says separates what is documented from what is assumed.

Frequently asked questions

What does AI visibility mean in plain terms?

Whether an AI assistant names your business when a customer asks it for one, and whether what it says about you is correct. Every metric in the category counts those two things across more questions and more assistants.

Is AI visibility the same as SEO?

The work is. Google says optimising for its generative features is still SEO, and that no separate files, markup or writing style are needed. The measurement is not: a ranking is a position in an index you can check, while AI visibility is whether a freshly generated sentence names you.

What is a good AI visibility score?

There is no benchmark, and a vendor quoting one is quoting their own arithmetic. Compare a location against itself over several months with the questions held identical, and against the rivals named in the same answers. Ignore the absolute figure.

Can you pay to improve AI visibility?

No. Google's local ranking page says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. OpenAI's help centre is just as plain about ChatGPT: it "ranks search results using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information. Placement is not guaranteed." Anyone selling a guaranteed mention is selling something they cannot deliver.

AI and Google reviews: do they change what AI says?

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Yes, and only one vendor documents it plainly. Google's Gemini API says its Maps grounding step "queries Google Maps for relevant information (e.g., places, reviews, photos, addresses, opening hours)", and answers questions about a place "based on Google user reviews and other Maps data". Everything else written about AI and Google reviews is inference from that, or somebody's guess dressed as a ranking factor.

Every quote below has a link and a date. Where a vendor has published nothing, this page says so instead of filling the space. AI search optimization for local businesses explains how these systems answer local questions; this page covers the reviews input.

AI and Google reviews: which assistants document reviews as an input

Four surfaces, and they are not equally forthcoming. Only Google names reviews as something retrieved, and only in its developer documentation.

Assistant	What the vendor documents about reviews	Where that leaves you
Gemini	Grounding with Google Maps (updated 2 September 2026): the service "queries Google Maps for relevant information (e.g., places, reviews, photos, addresses, opening hours)", and the first use case is answers "based on Google user reviews and other Maps data"	Reviews named as a retrieved input, in writing
Google AI Overviews and AI Mode	No review-specific rule. The AI features guide (updated 10 December 2025) says "the best practices for SEO remain relevant" and there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode". The optimization guide (updated 10 July 2026) says Google Business Profiles "can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results"	Reviews reach it the way they reach ordinary local Search
ChatGPT	Reviews are not named at all. What is documented is the mechanism: ChatGPT search "typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries" sent to search providers, and the answer is built from what those return	Your reviews count when a page carrying them is retrieved
Perplexity	Reviews are not named. Documented: it will "search the internet in real-time", and "each answer includes numbered citations linking to the original sources" (How does Perplexity work?)	Same as ChatGPT. Reviews count through the pages that carry them

Two things follow that most of the advice on this topic skips.

The Gemini quote comes from the developer API, which is what an application gets built on rather than a description of every answer the Gemini app gives. Read it as the clearest published statement that review text gets retrieved and read, not as proof that it happens on every query.

And for ChatGPT and Perplexity, your reviews are not a signal the assistant holds an opinion about. They are content on a page. If a Google Maps place page, a directory listing or a local roundup carrying your reviews comes back in the retrieval, the text of those reviews is in front of the model. If nothing carrying them comes back, they may as well not exist. OpenAI is blunt about the ceiling: "ChatGPT ranks search results using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information. Placement is not guaranteed."

How AI reads reviews: the nouns are the point

Reviews are the longest piece of writing about your business that you did not write. That is the whole argument. A model answering "who can see a rabbit in [suburb] on a Saturday" is looking for text that matches "rabbit" and "Saturday", and the only place those words are likely to appear about your clinic is in what your customers wrote.

Google demonstrates this on its own surface. The Places API's AI-powered review summaries (updated 1 September 2026) are "AI-generated summaries of places based solely on user reviews", produced "by synthesizing key elements of user reviews, such as place attributes and reviewer sentiment". Solely. Not your description, not your website copy. It is a developer feature, and Google says the summaries are not guaranteed for every place, so do not read it as something every listing gets. Read the principle: given a place, Google will write a description of it out of review text alone.

Take Rowan Street Vet, a fictional two-vet clinic with 96 reviews at 4.8 stars. Eighty of them say some version of "lovely staff, highly recommend". Those eighty are not useless. They hold the rating up, and the rating is real. But there is no sentence in them about rabbits, about after-hours, about a nervous dog or the cost of a dental. Nothing in them matches a question.

The other sixteen say things like "took our rabbit in on a Saturday morning when nobody else would look at an exotic" and "explained the dental quote line by line before doing anything". Those sixteen name a species, a day, a service and a behaviour. When somebody asks a question shaped like any of those, there is text to match.

Nothing about that requires you to script anything, and scripting it breaks Google's rules anyway. It follows from when you ask. A customer asked the same afternoon writes about the thing that just happened to them. A customer asked six weeks later writes "great service", because that is all they still remember.

Do review volume and recency change what AI says?

Volume and rating have documented weight in one place, and it is not an AI system. Google's local ranking page describes prominence as "how well-known a business is", then: "This factor's also based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." That is a statement about local Search and Maps. Gemini grounds on Maps, and a rewritten ChatGPT search returns local results, so the effect reaches the assistants second-hand. Second-hand is still real. It is also still second-hand, and most of the pages on this topic quietly drop that word.

Recency is different. Nobody documents it. Not Google, not OpenAI, not Perplexity. What can honestly be said is an observation: a profile whose most recent review is from 2023 reads as abandoned to a person, and retrieval systems generally favour current pages. Both are reasonable. Neither is published. So when somebody hands you a freshness window or a monthly review quota, the useful question is which document it came from, and the answer will be that it came from them.

Weighting is the same story. Nobody publishes what a review is worth against a link, whether Google reviews count differently from a trade directory's, or whether any threshold exists at all. Google's position on its own local ranking is that "we do our best to keep the search algorithm details confidential to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone", and no assistant has been more generous than that. Whether reviews move your local ranking is the fuller version of the documented half.

Your replies are text too

Everything above applies to what you write under a review. Google puts it in the reader-facing form on the same local ranking page: "When you reply to customer reviews, it shows that you value their feedback. Positive reviews and helpful replies can help your business stand out."

Where a reply gets read is worth being precise about. The Places API's review object carries the review text, the rating, the author, the timestamp, a flag link, a Maps link and a visit date. There is no field for the owner's reply. And the AI review summaries are drawn solely from user reviews. A reply is not reaching a model down either of those routes.

It reaches a model the way any other text does. Your reply is visible on the Maps place page and on any site that renders your reviews, so it is there to be read when one of those pages is retrieved.

What that means in practice is unglamorous. A reply that says "Thanks Sam" adds nothing to the page. A reply that names the treatment, corrects a factual error in the review, or states your actual cancellation policy adds a sentence of your own words to the only page about you that a customer and a model both read. Review response examples covers what a good one looks like for each kind of review.

The tactics that do not work, in Google's own words

Three tactics are being sold against this topic right now. All three break Google's prohibited and restricted content policy, which governs the profile you can least afford to lose.

Filtering who you ask. Sending happy customers to Google and routing unhappy ones to a private form is covered directly: merchants must not "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". It also defeats everything above. If review text is the raw material an assistant reads, a filtered corpus is one that does not describe your business. Cloutly has not had a rating step in front of the review sites since 2021, and review gating is the longer argument.

Incentives. The policy prohibits merchants who "offer incentives" of any kind, naming payment, discounts and free goods or services, "in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review". The permitted version sits in the same document and is the whole job: "solicit or encourage the posting of content that does represent a genuine experience, without offering incentives to do so or attempting to influence the rating or the contents of the review."

Asking for specific words. This is the one that looks clever after reading the section above, and the policy names it twice. Merchants must not attempt "to influence the rating or the contents of the review", and the prohibited list covers merchants requesting that staff "solicit reviews that include specific content, including content that identifies a staff member". The template that says "please mention emergency plumbing in [suburb]" breaks the rule in exchange for an effect no vendor has ever documented. Ask promptly instead and the specifics arrive on their own, because the customer still remembers them.

There is a fourth, which is less a tactic than a category error. Search anything in this area and something will offer to write your Google reviews for you with AI. Nothing that comes out of that is a review. It is a paragraph about a visit nobody made, banned on every site that would host it, and worthless to an assistant for the same reason real reviews are valuable: nobody experienced it.

What to do instead

None of it is new work. It is the same three jobs, done for a reason that has changed. The acronyms sold around it are unpacked in GEO vs SEO, AEO and LLMO, and Google's own surface has SEO for Google AI Mode.

Ask everyone, at the moment the job finishes. Not a drive, not a filtered list. Everyone, promptly, so the review describes the specific thing rather than the general feeling. How to get more Google reviews covers the ask and the timing.
Reply to everything, with a sentence that carries information. The reply is public text on the page an assistant reads, and Google says helpful replies help you stand out.
Keep the listing consistent everywhere. ChatGPT reads whatever the web returns about your hours and phone number, and OpenAI's own warning is that "search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect". Adding your business to Google Maps is the setup guide for the profile all of this rests on.

Then check whether any of it moved. There is no report for this, so the honest method is to ask the assistants the questions your customers ask and write down what came back, month after month, treating each answer as one sample rather than a rank. Does ChatGPT recommend businesses like yours has the prompt set and the log. Cloutly runs that sweep for you: AI search visibility asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity discovery questions such as "best {category} in {locality}" once a month and records whether each location was named and which rivals were.

No review count guarantees a mention in an AI answer. Anyone quoting one has made it up. Specific, current reviews put something about your business in front of the model in language that matches what somebody asked. Whether it gets used is not yours to control.

Frequently asked questions

Does ChatGPT use Google reviews?

Not directly, and OpenAI does not name reviews anywhere in its documentation. ChatGPT rewrites the question into a web search and builds the answer from the pages that come back. If one of those is your Google Maps listing, a directory entry or a local roundup that carries your reviews, the review text is in front of the model. If not, it is not.

How many reviews do I need before AI recommends my business?

Nobody knows, and nobody has published a threshold. Google documents that more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking, and stops there. A number quoted at you came from the person quoting it.

Do reviews written by AI help?

No. They are fabricated, they are prohibited on every site that would host them, and they defeat the purpose. What makes a review useful to an assistant is that a real customer described a real thing.

Do old reviews stop counting?

No vendor documents an expiry, a decay curve or a freshness window. What is observable is that a profile with nothing recent looks dormant to a human reader, and that these systems retrieve from the current web rather than a snapshot. Treat steady collection as the sensible default, not as a documented requirement.

Does ChatGPT recommend businesses like yours? How to check

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Does ChatGPT recommend businesses? Yes. Ask it for the best physio in your suburb and it will name three or four of them, with links. Whether it names yours depends on what it can find about you on the open web at the moment somebody asks, and none of the assistants publishes a ranking formula for local recommendations. What OpenAI, Google and Perplexity do publish is where the answer comes from, and that is enough to work with.

Most of what is written on this is guesswork, including several of the pages ranking for it today. So this piece quotes only what the three vendors have published themselves, says where that runs out, and gives you a test you can run in ten minutes a month.

ChatGPT answers a local question by searching the web, working out roughly where you are, and reading what it finds. OpenAI's help centre is direct about it: ChatGPT "can search the web to answer questions with current information and links to relevant sources" and "can also use location information to find local results, including restaurants, news, and weather" (Searching the web with ChatGPT, updated August 2026). Four details on that page matter to a business owner.

The question is rewritten before it is searched. OpenAI's own example: ask "What are some good restaurants near me?" and, if ChatGPT works out from your IP address that you are in the San Francisco area, it "may rewrite your prompt into the search query 'top restaurants San Francisco'". What goes out is an ordinary local search, and the pages that come back are the raw material for the answer. If the person has memory switched on, saved facts get folded into the rewrite too, which is one reason the same question from two people returns different businesses.

Location is approximate unless the customer hands over more. ChatGPT uses "an approximate location based on your IP address", and device location sharing "is optional and off by default". Someone on a home connection three suburbs away can be shown a different set of businesses from someone standing outside your door.

The sources are visible. Responses that use web search "may include citations", with a Sources control that opens the full list, and on iOS and Android "relevant results may also include a map". Read that list. It tells you which pages the answer was built from.

A website can be shut out, and no website is ever guaranteed in. OpenAI's crawler documentation says "sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links", and a robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to register. If somebody once dropped a blanket AI block into yours, check that before anything else here. Going the other way, the help centre closes off the ranking speculation in one line: "ChatGPT ranks search results using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information. Placement is not guaranteed."

One correction, because it appears on most of the pages ranking for this question: ChatGPT does not answer local questions out of training data any more. Web search reached everyone, signed in or not, on 5 February 2025. "It only knows what it was trained on" was true in 2023 and is a bad model of the thing now.

Gemini and Perplexity get their answers somewhere else

The three assistants work differently, so your effort should follow the sources each one uses.

	Where a local answer comes from	How it places you	What the reader sees
ChatGPT	A rewritten web search sent to third-party search providers, plus partner data	Approximate IP location; device location optional and off by default	Citations, a Sources list, and a map on mobile
Gemini	Google Search, and for developers a documented Google Maps grounding tool	Coordinates supplied by the app, or the place named in the question	Inline annotations linking to Google Maps
Perplexity	A live web search across pages its crawler can reach	The place named in the question	Numbered citations on every answer

Google's Gemini API documents a tool called Grounding with Google Maps, and it is unusually specific about the ingredients. At the data retrieval step the service "queries Google Maps for relevant information (e.g., places, reviews, photos, addresses, opening hours)", the model answers out of that, and the response carries "inline annotations linking to Google Maps sources". The first use case Google lists is handling place-specific questions: "Ask detailed questions about a specific place to get answers based on Google user reviews and other Maps data."

That is the clearest statement any vendor has made that your reviews are read as text when an assistant answers a question about your category.

For Google's consumer surfaces the guidance is shorter and points at the same place. Search Central says generative AI responses "can include product listings, product information, and information about local businesses", and that "Merchant Center feeds and Google Business Profiles can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results" (guide to optimizing for generative AI features). Its AI features guide opens by saying there is no separate game to play.

Perplexity is the simplest of the three. Its help centre says it uses AI to "search the internet in real-time" and that "each answer includes numbered citations linking to the original sources" (How does Perplexity work?). Its crawler documentation adds that PerplexityBot exists "to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity". For a local query, the answer is assembled from whatever public pages mention your category and your area: directories, review sites, roundups, your own site.

For a business with an address, that is three of five surfaces. AI search optimization for local businesses covers all five, including Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode, and the inputs they share.

Partly, and reviews are the only input on this list that a vendor has documented reading as text. Nobody publishes weightings for any of it. What follows is what the three vendors say they read, ordered by how much you can do about each one.

A complete Google Business Profile. Google's page on local ranking says local results "are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity", and that to improve relevance you should "provide complete and detailed business info". You cannot change how far you are from the person asking. You can finish the profile this afternoon.

Review count and rating. The same page, on prominence: "This factor's also based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." Gemini grounds on those local results, and a rewritten ChatGPT search returns them.

Review recency, which nobody documents. Google says nothing about it. Neither does OpenAI. It is a reasonable assumption, because a profile whose newest review is from 2023 looks abandoned to a person and probably to a model. It stays an assumption. Anyone quoting you a freshness window as a ranking factor invented the number.

What the reviews say, not only how many there are. The input most owners skip. Gemini's documentation makes it concrete: a question about a place is answered out of review text. Nobody writes "great service" in an answer about rotator cuff rehab. If forty of your reviews name the treatment, the technician, the breed or the machine, you have forty sentences an assistant can match to a question. If they all say "highly recommend", you have none.

The same details everywhere you are listed. ChatGPT rewrites the question into a web search and reads what comes back, so whatever the web says about your hours and phone number is what it repeats. OpenAI's warning is worth putting in front of anyone who assumes accuracy: "search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect."

Pages the assistants can read that mention you. Directories, local roundups, a supplier's stockist page, an association member list, a news mention. These are the citations that turn up under a local answer, and they are why a business with a thin website can still get named.

No, and that is documented rather than assumed. OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT in February 2026, on the Free and Go tiers, and the announcement is explicit on the point that matters here: "ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you", and an ad is "always clearly labeled as sponsored and visually separated from the organic answer" (Testing ads in ChatGPT, updated 11 August 2026). Buying the ad buys the ad. It does not buy the recommendation above it.

There is also nothing to install. Google's mythbusting section is blunt: "you don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities)". No llms.txt, no special schema, no AI-flavoured rewrite of your pages.

The shortcut people do try is buying reviews, and it is banned in the place the assistants read. Google's contribution policies disallow "reviews or ratings that have been paid for, directly or in kind" and forbid merchants from offering "incentives such as payment, discounts, free goods and/or services" in exchange for them. Filtering is the same problem in a nicer suit: the policy also stops merchants who "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers", and a filtered profile does not describe your business anyway. Ask everyone or ask nobody.

How to test whether ChatGPT recommends your business

Run the check once a month, on the same day, and write the results down. Ten minutes is enough. A single answer is not the point. The trend across months is, and so is the list of sources you keep seeing.

Write eight prompts and then stop changing them. Vary the shape, not the wording, month to month:
- best [category] in [suburb]
- [category] near [landmark] open [day]
- who should I see for [a specific problem you solve] in [suburb]
- best [category] in [suburb] for [customer type]
- [category] in [suburb] with [the thing people ask for: parking, late nights, a particular insurer]
- is [your business name] any good
- [your business name] reviews
- [your business name] or [a rival you actually lose to]
Name the location in the prompt. OpenAI's advice when local results show the wrong area is to "include your city, neighborhood, or postal code in your question". Do not rely on the assistant guessing it from your office connection.
Run every prompt in a fresh chat, in all three assistants, signed out where you can be. Memory and chat history change the rewritten query, so testing inside your logged-in account measures your account, not the world.
Record six things per run. Whether you were named, where in the list, which rivals were named, which sources were cited, whether your phone number and hours came back right, and the date.
Treat each result as one sample. These systems are not deterministic, so a re-ask can differ. One miss is not a verdict and one hit is not a rank.
Read the citations, because that is the work list. If the same directory or roundup is cited every month and you are not on it, that is a concrete job. If your Business Profile is the only source cited, everything rests on one page.

A spreadsheet with seven columns holds all of it. Two rows from a first month, one hit and one miss:

Prompt	Assistant	Named?	Position	Rivals named	Sources cited	Facts correct?
best physio in [suburb]	ChatGPT	yes	2	two rivals	Business Profile, a local roundup	phone number wrong
best physio in [suburb]	Gemini	no		three rivals	Maps

If you would rather not run it by hand, Cloutly's AI search visibility asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity discovery questions such as "best {category} in {locality}" once a month and records whether each location was named and which rivals were.

What changes when you ask every customer for a review

Here is the shape of it, with an invented business so nobody mistakes this for a case study. Coastline Physio has two sites and 31 Google reviews between them, most written in 2023, most of them one line long. Six months of asking every patient at the end of a course of treatment takes that to 180, all current, a good share of them naming the injury and the physio who treated it.

Three things follow, and they are not equally certain. The local ranking has a documented reason to improve, because Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help it. The reviews now carry language that matches real questions, which follows from Gemini's documentation on reading Maps reviews. And the profile stops looking dormant, which is the recency argument: plausible, undocumented.

What does not change is the certainty. There is no number of reviews that buys a mention in an AI answer, and a vendor promising one is selling something they cannot deliver. What reviews buy is candidacy: you become a business the assistant has something to say about. The rest is the unglamorous work it always was. Get more Google reviews steadily rather than in bursts, keep your Google Business Profile complete and accurate, and reply to the reviews you get so the profile reads as tended. Whether reviews move your local ranking is the longer answer.

FAQ

How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business? There is no submission form and no setting. Finish your Google Business Profile, make your details match everywhere you are listed, collect current reviews whose text names what you actually do, and check your site is not blocking OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. Then test monthly and work the sources the answers cite.

Why does ChatGPT name my competitor and not me? Usually for a reason you can check. They are cited in a source the assistant reached and you are not, or their profile answers the specific thing that was asked and yours does not, or the assistant placed the customer nearer to them. The Sources list tells you which.

How often should I check? Monthly. More often is misleading: a re-ask can return a different answer, so short-interval checking measures noise. Same prompts, same day each month, in a log you keep.

How to edit your Google Business Profile, and what happens after you save

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To edit your Google Business Profile, search for your business while signed in to the account that manages it, select Edit profile, change the field and select Save. In the Google Maps app, tap Business at the bottom right, then Edit profile. Google does not publish the change straight away. "We review your changes before we update them live on your profile", and "Edits usually take up to 10 minutes to review, but sometimes it can take up to 30 days."

Hours, phone and website usually reappear within the hour. Name, address and category are the three that can send you back through verification, so plan those changes. The clicks are quick. The wait and whatever Google does with the change come afterwards.

If a guide tells you to sign in to a Google My Business dashboard, it is out of date. That is why so many walkthroughs point you to menus you cannot find.

Google's own timings for an edit, and the three states it can come back in. Source: Google Business Profile Help, September 2026.

Where you edit a Google Business Profile now

There are two places to do it, and both work from your own listing. In Google Search, sign in with the account that manages the profile and search your business name. A panel opens above the results with Edit profile on it. In the Google Maps app, tap Business at the bottom right, then Edit profile. Either way you finish on Save (Edit your Business Profile).

Business Profile Manager at business.google.com is still live, but it manages a set of profiles rather than edits a single one.

Which fields you can edit, and which ones need verification

Everything below sits under Edit profile. The right-hand column tells you how carefully to approach each change.

Field	What Google says happens
Business name	"If you change your business name after it's verified, you might need to verify your business again"
Address and pin location	"If you move your business to a new address after it's verified, you must verify your business again"
Business category	"If you add or edit an existing category, you might be asked to verify your business again"
Regular and special hours	Reviewed, no verification step
Phone numbers	Reviewed. Two numbers on top of the primary one
Website, social links, description	Reviewed
Attributes, photos, opening date, service area	Reviewed

Name, address and category help Google decide that a business is real and matches its description, so changing one reopens that question. The rest is detail about a business Google has already accepted.

Names have another trap. Google wants the name that "reflect[s] your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers". It rules out taglines, store codes, trademark symbols, fully capitalised words, opening hours, phone numbers and location descriptors such as "Holiday Inn (I-93 at Exit 2)" (Guidelines for representing your business on Google). Adding your suburb or your main service to the name is the most common rejected edit, and it risks the whole profile: Google "reserves the right to suspend access to Business Profiles on Google or other Google Services to individuals or businesses that violate these guidelines".

A real rebrand is narrower than most people expect. Google allows a name change on the same profile only where "the proper nouns and services described in the business name remain unchanged and the business category remains unchanged". Anything larger counts as a new business: you mark the existing profile closed and create a new one, and the reviews stay on the old profile. Removing a business from Google covers closing one properly.

How to change business hours on Google

Customers use your hours the same day, so this is the field to get right.

Open your Business Profile and select Edit profile, then Hours.
Next to "Hours", select Edit, then Open with main hours.
Tick the box next to each day you are open. A day you leave unticked shows as closed.
Set the times with the dropdowns. For a day you trade around the clock, select Opens at, then 24 hours.
Select Save.

A third setting is easy to miss. Open with no main hours publishes the profile with no hours on it at all. That suits a business whose hours genuinely vary, but not one that has not filled them in yet (Edit your business hours).

While you are there, check whether the kitchen shuts before the venue or delivery runs later than the counter. Those details belong in More hours, not your main hours.

Special hours and holiday hours

Special hours are the tool for a one-off: hours that change "for a brief period of time, like for a special event", set "so that your regular hours don't change".

Select Edit profile, then Hours, then Edit next to "Special hours". Pick or add the date, mark the day closed or enter the times, and save. The ceiling is six days: "You can set special hours if your business temporarily adjusts its hours of operation or remains closed for up to 6 days in a row." Longer, or for a period you cannot put an end date on, and Google wants the profile marked Temporarily closed instead (How to set Special hours).

Public holidays are separate. On the holidays Google tracks for your country, "a warning may appear on your Business Profile that tells users your business hours might differ", whether or not anything about your day changes (About holidays on Google). Confirm the date to clear it. Do the next twelve months in one sitting.

How to update business information on Google without triggering a re-verification

Order matters when you have several things to change. Do the safe fields first and on their own: hours, phone, website, description, photos, attributes. They go into review and come back without moving anything else. Then take name, address and category one at a time, and only when you can prove the new detail from the public record. That is exactly what an appeal will ask you for.

Update the rest of the internet before you press Save. If the old number still sits on your website, you will have to make the edit twice.

How long does a Google Business Profile edit take to show?

Google reviews everything: "Edits that you make to your verified Business Profile are reviewed to ensure they follow our guidelines", and the published window is "Edits usually take up to 10 minutes to review, but sometimes it can take up to 30 days" (Understand what happens to your Business Profile edits). Most hours and phone changes land in minutes. Address changes, name changes and edits on a profile that has been suspended before are where the long tail lives.

Every edit ends in one of three states. Accepted means it is live. Not approved means "Google might not approve changes if it can't confirm its accuracy". Pending means it is still in review. Google's Check your edit status tool tells you which, so you do not have to refresh your own search result and guess. Sign in to the account that manages the profile first.

Google Business Profile edit not showing: what to check

Work down this list in order.

It is still pending. Anything under thirty days is inside Google's published window, however unreasonable that feels. Check the status. Resubmitting the same change speeds nothing up.
It was not approved. Google could not confirm the change was accurate. Most common on names, addresses and phone numbers, and appealable.
Google changed it back. A different thing from a rejection, and covered below.
You are editing a duplicate. Where two profiles exist for one site, your edit is live on the one nobody sees. Multiple locations with the same name, and how to fix a duplicate covers clearing them.
The profile is suspended. Nothing publishes from a suspended profile, and a keyword-stuffed name is a frequent cause.
You are looking at the wrong thing. Search your exact name and suburb, not a category term, and check on a device you did not edit from.

When an edit is rejected, and how to appeal

Rejected edits to your name, category, address, phone and website can be appealed, but the route depends on where the business trades. In the UK and the EEA it is Google's appeals tool. Everywhere else it is the contact form (Appeal rejected business information edits).

The route for a rejected edit is not the same everywhere. Source: Google Business Profile Help, September 2026.

The evidence matters most. Google wants official business registration, a business licence, tax certificates or utility bills, and it wants "the business name and address match the profile you want to make an appeal for". A power bill in a director's name at a home address does not match a shopfront profile. That mismatch is why appeals fail.

A few details catch people out. You get sixty minutes from submitting the appeal to attach the evidence. "Appeal reviews and decisions can take up to 5 business days", and a second appeal for the same issue slows the queue rather than the reverse. Do not create a fresh profile for the same business while the appeal runs, however tempting that gets.

When Google changes your profile back

An edit can disappear without being rejected. Google updates profiles on its own: "Google gathers info from different sources, like user reports and licensed content", and "If sources report that your profile info is incorrect or outdated, Google may update your profile." Members of the public suggest edits on Maps. A data provider can supply hours you never entered.

You can see this in the editor. The text colour is the tell.

Blue is Google's version of a field, not yours. Source: Google Business Profile Help, September 2026.

Change it back and save. The caveat is Google's own: "You can't manage all Google updates through your Business Profile." When a change keeps returning, correct the source instead. Usually it is your website footer, a directory with an old number, or a Facebook Page nobody has opened since the fit-out.

Editing several locations at once

At one site this is a ten-minute job. At twenty it is a different job, because every risky field multiplies and hours drift one location at a time.

Business Profile Manager is where that work happens, with business groups for access and a bulk upload spreadsheet for adding and updating profiles at volume. Managing several Google locations sets out the groups, the spreadsheet and the ownership roles, and adding a business to Google Maps covers any site not properly on Google yet.

The sequencing matters. Say Coastline Physio changes its phone number across nine clinics and Emma works through the profiles as she gets time. For that fortnight some clinics are right and some are not, and nobody can tell you which. Decide the new value once, hold it somewhere that is not a profile, and publish everywhere from that record.

Keeping the same facts on every other site

Customers check more than your Google profile, and Google does too. Hours on Yelp, a phone number on Facebook and an address in your website footer all affect how much Google trusts the version you just typed. Keeping them matching is listing consistency, sometimes called NAP consistency, and it is a subject of its own: what it actually does for your rankings, and the audit to run across all eight sources.

That single record is the practical answer. Cloutly's listings management works that way: one record per location carrying name, phone, website, description, address and hours, published to Google Business Profile and to the Facebook Page only after you approve a preview of the exact change, then checked weekly against Google's public view, Yelp, Facebook and TripAdvisor.

FAQ

Can I change my business name on Google without losing my reviews?

Only if the change is minor: the proper nouns and services in the name stay the same and the category does not change. Anything bigger counts as a new business, which means closing the existing profile and creating a new one. The reviews stay with the old profile.

Do I need to verify again if I only change my phone number?

No. Verification comes into it on the name, the address and the category. Phone, website, hours, description and photos are reviewed, but they do not reopen verification.

Why does Google keep changing my hours back?

Because something else is telling Google your hours are different. Google updates profiles from user reports and licensed data, and shows those changes in blue in the editor. Fix the source that disagrees with you, then set the hours again.

Can I still edit my profile in the old Google My Business dashboard?

No. That dashboard is gone. A single profile is edited in Google Search and the Google Maps app, and business.google.com now handles sets of profiles.

GEO vs SEO, AEO and LLMO: what the acronyms mean for a local business

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

GEO, AEO and LLMO all describe the same work as SEO. Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features settles it: "From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." The inputs have not changed. The measurement has.

Proposals often frame GEO and SEO as separate disciplines. They are not. If you run a business with an address, this is the vocabulary page for how AI search decides which local businesses get named: what each letter stands for, where it came from, and which parts of the pitch were invented.

What each acronym stands for

Acronym	Stands for	Where it came from	What it asks you to do differently
SEO	Search engine optimisation	The original term. Everything below is defined against it	The baseline
GEO	Generative engine optimization	A 2023 research paper, accepted at the KDD 2024 conference	Cite sources, add statistics, quote named people
AEO	Answer engine optimization	Popularised by marketers. No primary source claims the coinage	Answer the question directly, near the top
LLMO	Large language model optimization	Popularised by marketers, later than the other two	Nothing AEO does not already ask

GEO is the one with a paper behind it

GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, submitted in November 2023 by researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi and accepted at KDD 2024, is where the term starts. Its own sentence: "we introduce Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the first novel paradigm to aid content creators in improving their content visibility in generative engine responses". The paper reports that GEO "can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses".

That 40% is the figure the whole category quotes, so it is worth knowing what produced it. The winning tactics were citing sources, adding statistics, quoting people with names and titles, and writing more clearly. The tactic that lost ground was keyword stuffing. None of that is new advice, and none of it needs a new discipline to deliver it.

The paper is also more careful than its resellers. The same abstract says "the efficacy of these strategies varies across domains, underscoring the need for domain-specific optimization methods", and the GEO-bench benchmark it was measured on is "diverse user queries across multiple domains", not a test of which physio an assistant names in one suburb. The research is real. The retainer built on top of it is a different object.

AEO and LLMO have no origin story

AEO expands to "answer engine optimization" and LLMO to "large language model optimization". Google's guide gives the AEO expansion in the same breath as GEO's, which is close to the only authoritative definition either term has. Neither has a paper, a standards body or a documented first use.

Search "what is AEO" today and page one is a Reddit thread, a course seller and a run of software companies, several of them selling an AEO subscription underneath the definition. The term is defined mainly by people with a tool to sell, and in ordinary use it means "write things an assistant can lift".

If you have been sold both AEO and LLMO, you have been sold the same thing twice.

GEO vs SEO: what differs for a local business

Very little, and Google is blunt about the part it controls. Its AI features guide says: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary."

The inputs to a local AI answer were already on your list. A Google Business Profile that is finished rather than started. A review count and rating that keep moving, because Google's local ranking guidance says plainly that "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking". Review text that describes the job instead of saying "highly recommend". The same phone number and hours on every site that lists you. Pages elsewhere that mention you. A website the crawlers can reach. The parent piece sources each one and gives the order to work in.

One honest complication: ChatGPT and Perplexity do not run on Google's index, so Google's "no additional requirements" line does not cover them. The work list barely moves anyway. Those two assemble a local answer out of the public pages their crawlers can reach, which means directories, roundups, review sites, and your profile before your homepage. Being present and correct on the pages that already rank for your category is what local SEO has meant for a decade. Does ChatGPT recommend businesses like yours walks that half of it end to end.

What is different: the measurement

A search ranking is a position you can look up, and it holds still long enough to be checked. An AI answer is generated fresh every time it is asked, so being named once is a sample rather than a place you hold.

Reporting is split as well. Google gives you a first-party number for its own surfaces: Search Console's Generative AI performance report counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Google rolled it out "to all websites worldwide" on 31 August 2026. Nothing any other assistant does appears in it, so ChatGPT, the Gemini app and Perplexity end up measured with a log or a subscription rather than a dashboard you already own. AI visibility explained covers how those scores get built and why two tools handed the same business return two different numbers.

When a proposal offers GEO on top of SEO, the new line item is almost always measurement, not method.

The parts that were invented

Google's guide ends on a bullet that could stand as this section's heading: "Prioritize effective SEO strategies over 'AEO/GEO hacks'." Five claims recur in proposals.

Proprietary scores. Every AI visibility score is a count of how many sampled answers named you, divided by how many were sampled, and the vendor picks the denominator: their prompt list, their assistants, their sample size. Change any of the three and the score moves with nothing changed about your business. It carries a direction for one business over several months, with the questions held identical. It does not carry a level, because nobody has set an industry benchmark to compare it against. Google's warning applies to every vendor here, us included: "Be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use 'internal' Google metrics. No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems." AI search visibility tools goes through what a tracker can and cannot tell you.

The GEO agency. There is no separate discipline to staff. Google sends the question back to ordinary due diligence: "If you're considering third-party 'AEO' or 'GEO' advice or services, review our guidance on evaluating third-party SEO advice." Ask for the deliverables list before you sign, then count the line items an ordinary SEO would have done in 2019: fix the profile, fix the citations, get the site crawlable, publish pages that answer real questions. If that is all of them, you are buying SEO with a newer invoice.

Guaranteed mentions. Nobody can sell you one. Google's local ranking page says "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google", and OpenAI's help centre says ChatGPT "ranks search results using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information. Placement is not guaranteed."

The file and markup upsell. Google's guide names these one at a time. On llms.txt and its relatives: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't use them." Keep one if you like the tidiness. Google says it ignores them. On style: "You don't need to write in a specific way just for generative AI search." On link building rebranded: "seeking inauthentic 'mentions' across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem."

Keyword templates and rating steps. This one does damage. A request that asks the customer to work in a phrase, and any rating question standing in front of the review sites, both run into Google's prohibited and restricted content policy, which stops merchants soliciting reviews that include specific content or selectively soliciting positive ones. They also spoil the one asset an assistant reads as evidence about you. Review gating is the longer version.

What to do instead

Finish the Google Business Profile. Primary category, hours, every remaining field.
Check the crawlers can reach you, including any blanket AI bot blocks left over from 2023.
Ask every customer for a review, promptly and continuously, so the text describes specific jobs rather than general praise.
Fix the two or three directory listings carrying an old phone number.
Ask the assistants the same eight questions on the same day each month and write down what came back. Read the series, not the run.

Cloutly's AI search visibility does step five for you: it asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity discovery questions such as "best {category} in {locality}" once a month and records whether each location was named and which rivals were. Read it as a point-in-time sample of a system that is not deterministic, never as a rank.

Frequently asked questions

Is GEO the same as SEO?

For Google's surfaces, yes, and Google says so in its own documentation: optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience, and thus still SEO. For ChatGPT and Perplexity there is no equivalent statement, but the inputs are the same public pages and profiles, so the work list is the same work list.

What is AEO?

Answer engine optimization: writing so that a system generating an answer can find the answer in your page and repeat it accurately. There is no published origin for the term and no body that defines it. Google's guide gives the expansion and then puts it in the SEO bucket alongside GEO.

What does generative engine optimization mean?

It means improving how often a generative engine, meaning any system that answers a query with composed text rather than a list of links, names or cites you. The term comes from a 2023 paper accepted at KDD 2024, whose tested tactics were citing sources, adding statistics and quoting named experts.

Do I need a GEO agency?

Not as a separate line item. If the deliverables are profile hygiene, citations, crawlability and useful pages, that is SEO under a newer name. What you might reasonably buy is the measurement, since the non-Google assistants publish no first-party report.

Is LLMO different from AEO?

Not in practice. Large language model optimization and answer engine optimization describe the same work in different letters, and neither has a definition anybody can point to. Treat both as vocabulary rather than method, and ask what is on the work list.

SEO for Google AI Mode: what a local business has to change

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

SEO for Google AI Mode is the SEO you were already doing. Google puts it in one line in its guidance for site owners: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." No submission, no markup, no file to upload. What changes is the question your customer asks. AI Mode is built for the long comparative questions people used to break into four separate searches.

Everything below is quoted from Google's own help pages, developer documentation and announcements, checked on 6 September 2026. Where Google has published nothing, this post says so rather than filling the gap with a number somebody invented. The broader guide to how AI search decides which local businesses get named covers the other surfaces.

Google Search Help, captured 6 September 2026.

What is Google AI Mode, and where can people use it?

AI Mode is a separate search experience with its own page. Google Search Help calls it "Google's most powerful AI search experience", where "You can ask anything and get an AI-powered response, with the ability to go deeper through follow-up questions and helpful links to the web" (Get AI-powered responses with AI Mode in Google Search). People reach it three ways: at google.com/ai, by tapping AI Mode after typing a question on google.com, or from the home screen of the Google app.

The rollout, in Google's own announcements:

5 March 2025. AI Mode arrives as an opt-in experiment in Labs, offered first to Google One AI Premium subscribers (Expanding AI Overviews and introducing AI Mode).
20 May 2025. Google begins "rolling out AI Mode in the U.S.", with "no Labs sign-up required" and a new tab in Search and in the Google app (AI in Search: Going beyond information to intelligence).
21 August 2025. Google says it will "expand AI Mode to over 180 new countries and territories in English" (AI Mode in Search gets new agentic features and expands globally).

The live country list sits on the help page rather than in the announcement. On 6 September 2026 it named Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Ireland. If you serve any of those markets, your customers can already ask AI Mode who to call. Google maintains that list and changes it, so read the page rather than this sentence. One caveat from the same page, before you treat any answer as authoritative: "AI Mode doesn't always get it right."

AI Mode and AI Overviews are not the same feature

They get talked about as one thing. Google says otherwise: "AI Mode and AI Overviews may use different models and techniques, so the set of responses and links they show will vary" (AI features and your website).

	AI Overview	AI Mode
Where the customer meets it	Above the ordinary results, unasked. Google says they "are only shown when our systems determine that it is additive to classic Search, and as such, often don't trigger"	Its own page, entered on purpose, at google.com/ai or through the AI Mode button
What it is built for	Getting "to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly"	Queries "where further exploration, reasoning, or complex comparisons are needed"
The shape of the question	Usually one, typed as normal	"Nuanced questions that might have previously taken multiple searches", then follow-ups in the same thread
When the AI is not confident	Not documented	"In some cases, AI Mode will provide a set of web links if there's not high enough confidence in the quality or helpfulness of an AI response"
What you have to do differently	Nothing. The eligibility rule covers both	Nothing

The difference that matters commercially is who arrives. Somebody who opens AI Mode, describes the problem and asks two follow-ups has done their shortlisting inside the answer. By the time they click, the comparison is over. A searcher who glanced at an AI Overview on the way to the map pack has not. AI Overviews for local businesses covers that other surface on its own terms.

What query fan-out means when someone asks for a local business

AI Mode does not run the question you typed, and that changes which of your pages can be pulled into an answer. Google's help page: "AI mode uses a 'query fan-out' technique, dividing your question into subtopics and searching for each one simultaneously across multiple data sources." The developer glossary defines the same thing as "a set of concurrent, related queries generated by the model to request more information and fetch additional relevant search results to address the user's query" (Optimizing your website for generative AI features). Google adds that both AI Mode and AI Overviews may use it, so fan-out is not an AI Mode exclusive.

Google's own example is a lawn. Ask "how to fix a lawn that's full of weeds" and the fan-out queries might include "best herbicides for lawns", "remove weeds without chemicals" and "how to prevent weeds in lawn". One question, several searches, one assembled answer.

Now put a local question through the same machine. Somebody types: my dog is limping after a run, who should I take her to in Newtown and what will it cost. Google has not published the fan-out for that query and nobody outside Google can see it, so treat what follows as the shape of the thing rather than a leaked list. It is not one search. It is a question about limping in dogs, one about which kind of clinic treats it, one about vets in that suburb, and one about price.

So your service page is no longer competing only for "vet Newtown". It is one of several documents that can satisfy a branch of a question nobody typed that way. A page explaining what a limp usually means and what an assessment costs answers two branches at once. A page headed "Newtown's most trusted vets" answers none of them.

That is not an invitation to spin up a page per fan-out query. Google bans it in the same guide: creating separate content for every possible variation of how people might search, "primarily to manipulate rankings or generative AI responses in Google Search violates Google's scaled content abuse spam policy". Depth on the questions you get asked, not breadth across guessed ones.

The upside is Google's own claim. Its models "identify more supporting web pages" while the answer is written, so AI features "display a wider and more diverse set of helpful links associated with the response than with a classic web search". More links from more angles is an opening for a business too small to hold position three for its head term.

What AI Mode shows when the question is about a place

Business information is in scope. Search Central's generative AI guide says "Where appropriate, generative AI responses can include product listings, product information, and information about local businesses", and that Merchant Center and Google Business Profiles "can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results". Its sibling page turns that into a checklist item: "Checking that your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up-to-date."

AI Mode also reaches Google's place data, not the open web alone. Announcing the agentic version on 21 August 2025, Google wrote that "AI Mode uses the live web browsing capabilities of Project Mariner, direct partner integrations on Search, and the power of our Knowledge Graph and Google Maps to help users take action on the web", starting with restaurant reservations and "expanding soon to local service appointments and event tickets". The fine print matters: that booking behaviour launched as a US Labs experiment, not as the general feature.

There is one published description of how a place answer looks. Writing about travel on 27 August 2026, Google said an AI Mode hotel search returns "a visual list of options, complete with guest reviews and key factors to compare" (3 new ways to plan and book travel in Search). Guest reviews inside the answer, in Google's own account of its own feature.

What Google has published nowhere: which fields of a Business Profile appear in an AI Mode answer, how a set of businesses is chosen, or any weighting given to reviews inside AI Mode. If a vendor tells you AI Mode reads your last thirty reviews, or that 4.6 stars is the threshold, they made it up. What Google does publish about ranking a local business sits on the local ranking page: results "are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity", and "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking". That page is about local results, not about AI Mode, and the honest position is that the two overlap without Google having said how much. Whether Google reviews affect your ranking works through the documented half.

SEO for Google AI Mode: the four things you can change

None of them is new. That is Google's point, not a rhetorical flourish.

Be indexed and snippet-eligible. That is the whole technical requirement: "To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the Search technical requirements. There are no additional technical requirements." Businesses fail it by accident, usually a noindex, nosnippet or max-snippet left behind after a redesign. Search Console also carries a setting that excludes a site from generative AI features outright. Check both before you buy anything.
Finish the Business Profile and keep it current. Google names it on both guidance pages, it costs an afternoon, and it is the input you control most directly. Our guide to adding your business to Google Maps has the setup and verification steps.
Make your details identical everywhere you are listed. AI Mode reaches Maps and the Knowledge Graph as well as the open web, so an old phone number on a directory is a number Google has seen. Dull work, and the highest-yield hour on this list.
Write the page that answers a branch of the question. The questions your customers ask in the first ten minutes of an appointment are the pages: what a symptom usually means, what the options cost, what you do that the place down the road does not.

There is nothing to install. Google's generative AI guide is blunt about it: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't use them." Any quote you are handed for an llms.txt file or an AI-flavoured rewrite of your service pages is a quote for work Google says it ignores.

Reviews sit underneath all of it, and the way to get them is to ask every customer rather than the ones you expect to be pleased. Google's contribution policies bar merchants from offering "payment, discounts, free goods and/or services" in exchange for a review, and from moves that "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". A filtered profile describes a business that does not exist, which is a poor thing to hand a model. How to get more Google reviews covers the timing and the follow-up.

What AI Mode does to your clicks

Google is the only party with the aggregate data, so this section quotes Google and stops. On 6 August 2025, Liz Reid, VP and Head of Google Search, published the company's line: "Overall, total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year", along with the concession underneath that average, that "user trends are shifting traffic to different sites, resulting in decreased traffic to some sites and increased traffic to others" (AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks). Google has published nothing about clicks from AI Mode specifically. Read the rest for what it is: a company describing its own product in aggregate with no method attached, not a finding about your website. The figures circulating elsewhere are not Google's and do not agree with each other.

How to check what AI Mode says about your business

Search Console covers the website. A manual check covers the business itself.

Your website. Search Console's generative AI performance report "shows data about how your site performs in generative AI features on Google Search", counting impressions, which Google defines as "how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search". As of 31 August 2026 Google has "rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide". Two limits to know before you open it: the report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode together with no way to separate them, and it excludes anything a person saw inside a Search Labs experiment. An empty report usually means too few impressions, or a site excluded from generative AI features.

Your business. Search Console reports on your site, not on your Business Profile, and an impression count says nothing about whether the answer named you, described you correctly or sent the customer to a rival. For that you run the questions your customers run, from the area they are in, and write down what comes back. How to check whether AI assistants recommend your business has the prompts, the sign-out settings and the log, including how to run AI Mode cleanly.

Do the other assistants while you are there, because they answer local questions from different sources and cite different pages. Does ChatGPT recommend businesses like yours covers where each one gets its local answer. Cloutly's AI search visibility asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity discovery questions such as "best {category} in {locality}" once a month and records whether each location was named and which rivals were. It does not sample AI Mode, so for Google's own surfaces the hand check and Search Console are what you have.

Frequently asked questions

Is Google AI Mode available in Australia and New Zealand?

Yes. On 6 September 2026, Google's AI Mode help page listed Australia and New Zealand, along with the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Ireland. Google announced the expansion to "over 180 new countries and territories in English" on 21 August 2025. It maintains the list and changes it, so check the page rather than this sentence.

Do I need schema markup or an llms.txt file for AI Mode?

No. Google says you don't need new machine readable files, AI text files, markup or Markdown to appear in Google Search including its generative AI capabilities, "as Google Search itself doesn't use them", and that structured data "isn't required for generative AI search". Keep your structured data for rich results in ordinary Search. That is what earns its place.

Can I see AI Mode traffic on its own in Search Console?

No. The generative AI performance report combines AI Overviews and AI Mode and does not split them, and both are also counted inside the ordinary Performance report under the Web search type. There is no AI Mode filter.

How many reviews do I need to be named in AI Mode?

Google has never published a number, for AI Mode or for local results generally. It documents reviews as an input to local ranking, in the words "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking", and it has documented nothing about how reviews are used inside an AI Mode answer. Anyone quoting you a threshold invented it.

Google review link: how to get it, and where to put it

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Your Google review link is the URL that opens the review box on your Business Profile with the star selector already showing. You copy it from your own profile, on a computer: Read Reviews, then Get more reviews, then Copy. That part takes a minute.

Once you've copied it, the real work is deciding where the link lives and what a customer has to do after they tap it. Two things break it most often, and neither is the URL: the customer has no Google account, or the profile you copied it from is not the listing people find.

Google's own instructions, read 6 September 2026. Note the line about QR codes and computer browsers.

How to get your Google review link

These are Google's own instructions, as they stand in September 2026:

Go to your Business Profile. Signed in to the account that manages it, searching your own business name on Google is the quickest way there. If you cannot find the profile at all, how to see your Google reviews covers where it lives now.
Select Read Reviews, then Get more reviews.
To copy the review link, select Copy. To save the QR code, right-click it and select Save image as.

One catch trips people up. Google says reviews QR codes "can only be generated on a computer browser, not on mobile devices". Do this on a computer, not on a phone between appointments.

Then paste the link somewhere you will not lose it. A pinned message in the team chat works. So does the shared document where the rest of your marketing assets live. Most owners who come looking for this link have copied it before and cannot remember where it went.

Building the link from a Place ID

You can also build the URL yourself. Every place on Google Maps has a Place ID, which Google defines as "a textual identifier that uniquely identifies a place". Look yours up in Google's Place ID finder, put it after https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=, and you get the same review box.

It deserves an honest label, because most articles give it none. Google does not document that URL. The Place ID finder sits in the Maps Platform developer documentation, which is written for people building apps, and no Business Profile help page tells a business owner to construct a review link this way. It works today. It is not a supported feature, so it can change without a deprecation notice. Google also warns on that same page that "Place IDs may change over time".

Volume is the one case where it earns its keep. If you are building links for forty locations and the Place IDs are already sitting in a spreadsheet, generating the URLs beats clicking through forty profiles. For a single business, copy the link Google hands you.

Short links, QR codes and the g.page name you cannot get any more

The link Google gives you is fine in a text message, where nobody reads the URL. It is ugly on a printed docket, which is why businesses go looking for something shorter.

Custom short names used to be the answer. A business could claim a name and hand out g.page/yourbusinessname. Google's help page on short names now says you can no longer create or edit short names, and that the ones that already exist "will still work but will no longer be shown on the Business Profile to customers". A short name already painted on a window keeps working. You cannot get a new one.

Third-party shorteners are the usual substitute. They work, with two things worth knowing before you print five thousand of anything. A shortened link hides where it goes, which costs you some trust in an SMS. And a free shortener account can lapse and take the link with it. If you shorten, use a domain a customer will recognise as yours.

For anything physical, a QR code sidesteps the problem. Google's panel gives you one, and there is a Google review QR code generator here if you want a printable poster in the next five minutes. Either way, test the code at the size it will be printed, from where a customer will be standing, before you order the run.

If you would rather not touch Business Profile, a generator will build the code off your listing and lay out the poster for you.

Where to put your Google review link

Google names four places on the same help page: on your receipts, in your thank you emails, at the end of a chat interaction, and printed and displayed in your store. That is a fair start, and it leaves out the one that does the most work. Trades put it on the van and the invoice, which getting reviews for home services goes through, and a site can carry the reviews themselves, as in adding Google reviews to Wix.

Where	Why it works	What to watch
A text message after the job	It arrives on the device the review gets written on	One message, one link, no preamble
Your email signature	Costs nothing and runs on every thread you already have	It is passive, so treat it as a bonus rather than the ask
The invoice or the receipt	The customer is already looking at it, and it dates the ask to the job	Print the QR code, not the URL
A card at the counter or on the desk	Catches the customer who never opens a message	Somebody has to actually hand it over
Your website's thank-you or confirmation page	Reaches people mid-transaction with no extra send	Only meaningful if the job is genuinely done at that point

The text message and the QR code cover for each other. The message reaches the customer who has already left; the code catches the one who never opens anything from a business.

Timing beats placement anyway. The same link sent an hour after a haircut and a fortnight after a haircut are two different messages. If sending them by hand is the bottleneck, that is what review campaigns do: a repeat customer is one contact asked once, a second booking moves the ask rather than adding one, and anyone who reviewed you in the last 90 days is skipped. For the wording that goes around the link, there are copyable review request templates for SMS and email.

The link is an invitation, not a gate

Send the link to everyone you served. Not the happy ones. Not the customers you have a good feeling about.

Google's Maps user generated content policy files the alternative under rating manipulation. Merchants must not "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". Filtering who gets the link is exactly that, whether you do the filtering by hand or with software that asks for a star rating first.

The same list bans paying for the outcome. Merchants must not "Offer incentives ... in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review". In the United States that is law as well as policy: the Federal Trade Commission's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials (16 CFR Part 465, announced 14 August 2024) bans compensation or incentives conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment, and lets the FTC seek civil penalties against violators.

One more line in that list governs both the counter card and the staff leaderboard. Google says that when soliciting reviews, "merchants should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises, nor should they request that specific content be included", and it spells out that this covers asking staff to bring in a set number of reviews, or asking staff to solicit reviews that name them. So leave the card on the counter. Do not stand over anybody while they write, do not tell them what to say, and do not set your team a monthly review target.

What Google does allow it puts plainly: merchants may "Solicit or encourage the posting of content that does represent a genuine experience, without offering incentives to do so or attempting to influence the rating or the contents of the review". Asking is fine. Asking selectively is not. How to get 5-star Google reviews without breaking the rules has more on where that line sits.

The merchant rules under Rating Manipulation, read 6 September 2026. The two staff bullets sit under the on-premises rule.

What your customer has to do on their side

A Google review needs a Google account. Google is explicit: "Customers must be signed into a Google Account to leave a review. They can set one up with a non-Gmail email address." There is no anonymous review on Google. A willing customer who has never had an account faces a sign-up before they can help you, and a fair share of them stop there. That accounts for more silent failures than any broken link.

When someone taps your link they get the review box on your listing: a star selector, a text field and a Post button. Nothing is filled in for them, and nothing is filtered on the way through. A review with a sentence or two of text tells the next reader more than a bare five stars does, so it is fine to say what you would find useful, as long as you are not dictating it.

If a customer tells you they have no account and will not make one, take the answer. Point them somewhere else to leave feedback and move on. The review that never gets written costs you nothing. The customer you badger costs you more.

If you have more than one location

One Business Profile, one review link. There is no single link for a business with several sites, because the link points at a listing and every location has its own.

Open each profile in turn and repeat the copy step, then label them somewhere your team can read: location name, link, QR code file. The common failure is one link copied out of head office and pasted into every location's messages, which quietly parks every review on one listing and leaves the other profiles looking dead. If your sites are already asking in different ways with different links, how to get more Google reviews covers making the ask consistent across all of them.

When the Google review link does not work

It opens the wrong business

Almost always a duplicate or an unclaimed listing, which means you copied the link from a profile that is not the one customers find. Search your business name in an incognito window and see which listing Google shows. If two exist, that is a merge job before it is a link job.

The customer says they reviewed you and you cannot see it

The link is rarely the culprit. Reviews take time to appear, spam filters hold some back, and a recent profile merge or address change can hide a batch. Why a Google review is not showing up works through the causes in order.

The QR code will not scan

Usually size or contrast. As a rule of thumb, print it at least 2 cm square for something held in the hand, and considerably larger for a window or a counter where people stand back. Keep it dark on light, and leave the quiet border around it alone.

Nothing arrives at all

Before you blame the link, check that anyone is sending it. Tap your own link out of a real text message, on a real phone, and count the steps to a posted review. If the link is fine and the volume is still zero, the problem is the ask rather than the URL.

FAQ

Is there a Google review link generator? Google generates the link for you, inside your own Business Profile, at Read Reviews then Get more reviews. Third-party generators almost all build the Place ID URL described above, which Google does not document, so they can break without warning.

How do I share my Google review link? Copy it and paste it wherever you already talk to customers. Google's own panel will also send a review request for you by email, WhatsApp message or Facebook post.

Can a customer leave a Google review without a Google account? No. Google requires an account, though it does not have to be a Gmail address. A customer can create one against an email address they already use.

Can I offer a discount to customers who use the link? No. Google prohibits incentives in exchange for a review, and in the United States the FTC's 2024 rule makes incentives conditioned on a particular sentiment unlawful. Ask everyone, offer nothing.

Google reviews widget for WordPress: plugin or no plugin

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A Google reviews widget on WordPress comes in one of two forms: a plugin from the plugin directory, or one line of HTML pasted into a Custom HTML block. Both end in the same block on the same page, pulling the same reviews from the same profile. The plugin buys you a settings screen in wp-admin and costs you a dependency. The snippet costs one paste and leaves nothing to maintain. Which is right depends less on the reviews than on who edits your site, and on whether that site sits in a network.

Everything below was read against a primary source on 6 September 2026: WordPress's own documentation, three plugin directory listings, Elementor's help centre, Google's Places API reference and the FTC's consumer reviews rule. Install counts drift, so the ones quoted carry their date.

Plugin or snippet: the actual difference

	A plugin	One snippet
How it goes on	Plugins > Add New, activate, connect your profile	Paste into a Custom HTML block
Where the block can appear	Block, shortcode, widget area, page builder	Anywhere on the site that takes HTML
Who can put it there	An Administrator, on a single site	Anyone with the `unfiltered_html` capability
What you maintain	The plugin, plus whatever it depends on	Nothing on your side
Usual failure	Abandoned, or breaks on a WordPress release	The provider's script stops loading
If you leave WordPress	Rebuild the block	Same line, new site

The rule of thumb: if the reviews have to appear in eight places and the person adding them thinks in shortcodes, take the plugin. If one service page needs one block, take the snippet.

What a WordPress Google reviews plugin gives you

A plugin earns its keep three ways, and they are real ways. It fetches on a schedule, so new reviews turn up without you touching the page. It caches them in your database, so the page is not calling an external service on every visit. And it hands you a shortcode that drops the same block into a page, a widget area or a page builder.

The directory is where to look, not a vendor's landing page. These are the listings that own the search today. Widgets for Google Reviews by Trustindex has about 900,000 active installations, as of September 2026, and 4.9 stars from 2,631 reviews. Rich Showcase for Google Reviews by richplugins has about 100,000, at 4.9 from 1,617. Reviews Feed has about 100,000 too, and covers Yelp as well as Google.

Read the free tier before you assume it does the first of those three. Rich Showcase's own FAQ is unusually straight about it: "you can connect and display up to 10 Google reviews without any API key", but without one "the initial 10 reviews are loaded once and remain static until you manually reconnect the place". A free plugin is often a snapshot with a settings screen, not a feed.

Site Kit is not a reviews plugin

Site Kit by Google is the official Google plugin and sits on more than five million sites, which is why people assume it handles reviews. It connects Search Console, Analytics, AdSense, PageSpeed Insights, Tag Manager, Google Ads and a couple of newer modules. Not one of them is Google Business Profile, and not one displays a review.

What a Google reviews plugin for WordPress costs you

The plugins that refresh on their own do it with a Google Cloud project and a Places API key, which means a billing account in your name and a key you now own. Rich Showcase is explicit: "an API key is only needed if you want reviews to update automatically". A vendor account instead of a key is the same dependency with someone else's billing attached.

The number of reviews is another catch. Google's Places API reference states it plainly for the reviews field: "A maximum of 5 reviews can be returned." The older Place Details endpoint said the same thing in different words. So a plugin promising ten reviews or a hundred is not reading them all out of that field, and it is worth asking where the rest come from, because the Google Maps Platform terms restrict copying and storing user reviews. The parent guide on embedding Google reviews covers that ground in full.

Abandonment is the other risk. The directory prints Last updated and Tested up to on every listing for exactly this reason. A reviews plugin nobody has touched in two years is not a stable choice, it is a security liability sitting on your site so a layout looks tidy. Check those two fields on the day you install, not the star rating. And remember what you are installing: PHP that runs on every request, plus a stylesheet and a script.

How to add a Google reviews widget to WordPress without a plugin

Build the widget first. In your review service, connect the Google location, choose a layout, set the theme, copy the snippet.
Open the page in the block editor and click the Block Inserter. WordPress documents a shortcut worth learning: "You can also type /html and hit enter in a new paragraph block to add one quickly."
Click Edit HTML on the empty block and paste the snippet. It is normally one script tag with an id in it:
```
<script src="https://app.cloutly.com/add-widget-v2.js" data-widget="YOUR-WIDGET-ID" async></script>
```
That one is ours. Cloutly connects a Google location, gives you nine layouts to choose from, and hands back one snippet that works on WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace or any site that accepts an HTML snippet; the layouts are on the review widgets page. Whatever service you use, keep the async attribute, or the browser stops building your page while it fetches the widget.
Press Update, then open the published page in a private window. The editor preview is not proof.

WordPress's own demo of the block since 7.0. The CSS and JavaScript tabs are the tell: if you cannot see them, read the next section before you paste anything.

Get the layout and the colours right before you go near wp-admin.

The `unfiltered_html` trap, and why it bites franchises

This is where people lose an afternoon, and WordPress never tells you it has happened.

The Custom HTML block documentation sets it out: "Starting in WordPress 7.0, the Custom HTML block introduces separate editing panels for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The CSS and JavaScript panels are only available to users with the unfiltered_html capability." Without it, "WordPress will sanitize the block's content using the function wp_kses(), stripping disallowed tags such as <script> and <iframe>". You paste, you press Update, the snippet is gone, and no message appears.

Who has the capability, per the roles and capabilities documentation:

Role	Can paste a working script tag
Super Admin (Multisite)	Yes
Administrator	Yes on a single site. No on Multisite
Editor	Yes on a single site. No on Multisite
Author, Contributor, Subscriber	No

The Multisite row catches multi-location businesses, in WordPress's own words: "In WordPress Multisite, only Super Admins have the unfiltered_html capability." If your locations run as sites on one network, a manager who is an Administrator of their own site cannot paste a review snippet into it.

The plugin route does not rescue them either. The same capability table marks install_plugins as "yes (single site)" for an Administrator and "yes" only for a Super Admin, so on a network a location manager can neither install the plugin nor paste the snippet. Whoever runs the network does both, for everyone. Sort that out before you send fifteen managers a snippet and a click path.

Block editor, classic editor and page builders

The block is not called the same thing everywhere, and on one of these the permission rule is different again.

Block editor. The Custom HTML block, as above.

Widget areas. Since WordPress 5.8 the block-based widgets editor has brought blocks to Appearance > Widgets, so a footer or sidebar takes the same Custom HTML block. If the Classic Widgets plugin is installed to turn that off, you are back to the Text widget, which WordPress describes as "used to enter HTML, JavaScript, or just plain text".

Elementor. Use the HTML widget, the one with the </> icon. Elementor's documentation says "Inside the HTML Widget you can embed HTML, CSS, Shortcodes, and also include JS scripts", then adds a gate of its own: "access to the widget is restricted to admins. This can be changed in the Role Manager." That is Elementor's rule, sitting on top of WordPress's.

WPBakery. Its built-in element list carries Raw HTML and, beside it, a separate Raw JS. A script-tag snippet belongs in Raw HTML.

Why your Google reviews widget is blank in WordPress

Check these in order.

Start with the block. Open it again, and if the code is gone rather than broken, it is the capability rule above.

Next, a caching plugin holding the JavaScript. This is the common one, and it looks exactly like a broken widget. WP Rocket's Delay JavaScript Execution setting delays "the loading of all JavaScript files and inline scripts until there is a user interaction". LiteSpeed Cache's Delayed mode says the same in its own words: it "doesn't run the JS until it detects user activity, like a key click or mouse pointer movement". So the block stays empty until the visitor moves the mouse, and empty in every screenshot and speed test. Both plugins let you exclude one script. Exclude the widget's rather than turning the setting off site-wide.

The third check is simpler: you are looking at a cached page, or at the editor. Purge after you paste, then open the live URL in a private window. Preview proves nothing about a third-party script.

Where the block goes on a WordPress site

Nobody hesitates in a homepage footer, so proof there is decoration. Put the block under the booking button on a service page, and on each location page show that location's reviews rather than a feed blended across every site.

Then keep it current, because a review block ages in public in a way a paragraph of copy does not. Coastline Physio, a fictional two-clinic practice, could paste four good reviews under the Book now button on each clinic page and never touch it again. A year later that block argues for the other side, because the newest date on it still reads 2025. Sending the Google review link after each appointment keeps the dates moving.

If a second site runs on another platform, the block and the limits change: there are separate walkthroughs for Wix and for Squarespace, where a code block needs a Core plan before JavaScript runs at all.

FAQ

Can I embed Google reviews in WordPress without a plugin? Yes. A Custom HTML block takes the snippet, and that is the whole install. You need a service that holds the connection to your Google profile, and a role with the unfiltered_html capability.

Is there a free Google reviews widget for WordPress? Several, on the free tiers of directory plugins. Read what free means on each: it usually caps the reviews shown, keeps the vendor's badge on the block, and in at least one case stops updating until you reconnect the profile by hand.

Will a reviews plugin give me star ratings in Google? No. Google's review snippet documentation says that where the entity being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, its pages "are ineligible for star review feature", and the example it gives is an embedded third-party widget. Switching on your widget's review schema is still worth doing, because it puts the rating on the page in a form search engines can read. More on that in review schema markup.

Can I show only my five-star reviews? You can sort, and the FTC's questions and answers on its consumer reviews rule take the question directly: if your site orders reviews by rating with all the five-star ones on top, "the rule does not cover that situation". The same answer carries the sting: "organizing reviews in a way that makes it difficult for consumers to know about or find negative reviews could be an unfair or deceptive act or practice in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act". None of this is legal advice. Filter by a rule you can say in one sentence, put that sentence near the block, and ask every customer rather than a screened few.

Blog | Cloutly | Reviews, Reputation and Digital Marketing Insights

How to add Google reviews to Squarespace (code block)

Which Squarespace plan do you need to add Google reviews?

Squarespace has no Google reviews feature

Code block, embed block or code injection

Fluid Engine or the classic editor: where the block can go

How to add Google reviews to Squarespace, step by step

Why your review block is blank

Stars, filtering, and keeping the block current

FAQ

How to add Google reviews to a Wix website (no app needed)

Wix has no Google reviews element

Route 1: an app from the Wix App Market

Route 2: a Google reviews widget for Wix, as one HTML snippet

What Wix's Embed HTML element does to your widget

It is an iframe, and it will not resize itself

HTTPS only

You do not need Velo, and you do not want a custom element

Do you need a paid Wix plan to embed Google reviews?

How to add Google reviews to a Wix website, step by step

Wix Studio puts it under a different menu

The mobile version is a second job

Keeping the block honest, and current

FAQ

AI Overviews for local businesses: how to appear

What is an AI Overview?

When does Google show an AI Overview for a local search?

What do AI Overviews use to answer a local question?

Is there special markup or a file for AI Overviews?

How to appear in AI Overviews as a local business

What AI Overviews do to your clicks

AI Overviews and AI Mode are not the same thing

How to check whether you appear in AI Overviews

Frequently asked questions

Can I stop my business appearing in AI Overviews?

Do I need schema markup to appear in an AI Overview?

Does an AI Overview replace the map pack?

AI search optimization for local businesses: how ChatGPT, Gemini and Google decide who gets named

What AI search optimization means, and whether GEO and AEO are different

How AI search works for local businesses: the five surfaces

The inputs all five have in common

What does not work

AI answers send fewer people to your site. Being named is the point.

How to get found in AI search: the monthly check

Where to start

Where to go deeper

Frequently asked questions

Does AI search replace my Google Business Profile?

Which assistant should I care about most?

How long before any of this changes an answer?

Do I need a separate version of my website for AI?

AI search visibility for multi-location brands: why the suburbs get missed

The brand answer and the location answer are different questions

Two ways a network fails, and only one of them is obvious

A weak site drags only itself, until the brand answer picks it up

The brand is named, but the wrong branch is

What gets read per location, and what gets read once for the brand

How to check AI search visibility across 200 locations without a full-time job

How to read the results

What to do with a location that is never named

Reporting AI search visibility to the board

Frequently asked questions

Should we check AI search visibility by brand or by location?

Can one bad location affect how AI describes the whole brand?

Is AI search visibility the same as our local ranking?

44 AI search statistics for 2026

How many people use AI assistants for search

How many people use AI for local business recommendations

What share of Google searches show an AI Overview

What AI answers do to clicks

Which sources AI answers cite

How Google's AI Mode is rolling out

What businesses are doing about AI search

How these AI SEO statistics are checked

AI search visibility tools: what they measure and how to choose

What AI search visibility tools actually do

Six questions that decide which AI search visibility tool you buy

1. Which assistants does it ask?

2. How many prompts, how often, and how many samples of each?

3. Does it work per location, or only per brand?