How small businesses get cited by AI assistants

When a customer asks an AI assistant about the kind of work you do, the answer is put together from pages the tool has read. A study reported by Search Engine Journal suggests those pages lean towards official and research sources rather than explainer articles. That has a practical result for a small business: the plain, factual pages on your own site are the ones with a chance of being used.

What the study found

Search Engine Journal reported that government health, research and regulator sites had climbed in the ranking of sites ChatGPT cites most in the United States, while explainer-style pages had fallen. The figures come from a study of citation data for that assistant in that market. You can read the article itself at Search Engine Journal.

The direction is towards primary sources: the authority, research body or regulator that publishes the original information, rather than an article summarising it. Search Engine Journal presents this as what the data showed, for citations in the United States, at that point. It is not a statement about how any one business will be treated.

Why this matters to a small business

An AI assistant can only describe your business using pages it has read. When a customer asks one of these tools who does your kind of work in your area, the answer is built from whatever the tool treats as a usable source. If your site is not among them, you are not in the answer, however good your service is.

The study is about the kind of source these tools lean on, not about any particular trade. A shop, a workshop, a consultancy and a food business all meet the same thing: the assistant needs a page that states, in plain words, what the business does, where it does it and for whom. A line such as "the trusted choice" gives it very little to work with, because there is no fact inside it to repeat.

This sits alongside ordinary search rather than replacing it. Pages built to answer a customer's question clearly tend to serve both.

What a page an assistant can quote looks like

A citable page states facts in plain sentences and deals with a single subject. In our experience, that is also the kind of page a customer finds easier to read.

• Say what you do, where you do it and who you do it for in the opening paragraph, not at the end of the page.
• Give concrete details: the services you offer, the areas you cover, your opening hours and how a job, booking or order is handled.
• Answer the exact questions customers ask you on the phone, using their words rather than industry ones.
• Keep each page to a single subject, so a tool can tell what the page is about.
• Keep the facts current. An out-of-date page gives an assistant something wrong to repeat.
• Keep your business name, address, phone number and service details the same wherever they appear.

A sentence such as "We repair domestic washing machines and cover these areas" is more useful to a tool than a paragraph about quality. It says who, what and where, and it can be quoted without being twisted. That is the trade worth making: write the dull, specific sentence.

What you can check yourself

None of these checks changes anything on your site, and you can do them yourself in a few minutes.

• Ask an AI assistant the question a customer would ask about your kind of service in your area, and read which sites it names. If yours is not there, that is your starting point.
• Read your main service page and mark each sentence as fact or claim. If claims outnumber facts on that page, it is the one to rewrite.
• Ask an assistant about your own business by name and read the answer. Wrong opening hours, an old address or a service you no longer offer means a page somewhere is out of date.
• Look at your list of pages. If everything sits on one long home page, a tool has little to work with and nothing to quote precisely.
• Compare the details on your home page, service pages and contact page. Different phone numbers or hours give an assistant two versions of the same fact.
• Check your contact page from a customer's point of view: can someone find your service area, hours and how to reach you without hunting?
• Ask the assistant a question you already know the answer to, and see whether it names any small local business at all. That tells you how it behaves in your field.

Where to start

Start with your main service pages and rewrite them as plain descriptions of what you offer. Anything that changes a live site, its structure or its settings is best done by whoever looks after it, so send them the list rather than editing alone.

1. Rewrite your main service pages so the opening lines say what you do, where and for whom, and keep the rest factual.
2. Add a short page for each question customers ask most, one question per page, answered in a few plain sentences.
3. Make the name, address, phone number, hours and service details identical everywhere they appear.
4. Review those pages every few months, and whenever your hours, services or coverage change, so the facts stay right.

If you write nothing else this month, write the plain paragraph at the top of your main service page. This is the kind of work our engineers do for clients who would rather hand it over.