New and coming up: AI tools for your business

If you’ve read anything we’ve written about AI search, you’ll know the frustrating bit. Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT decide what to say about your business based on what they can scrape, and you get no say in it. You can’t log in anywhere. You can’t correct a wrong opening time. You can’t even see how often you come up.

In the last few weeks that’s started to shift, from both sides. Not dramatically. But for the first time there are things a business owner can actually do, rather than just hope. Three of them, and a fourth on the horizon that explains why the first three matter.

01 · Live now

Google’s Preferred Sources button

Google launched this on 20 August. Readers can mark a website as a “preferred source”, and once they have, Google shows more of that site’s content when it’s relevant. Not just in the Top Stories news carousel either. It carries through to AI Overviews and AI Mode, where your content gets a “preferred” badge, which is the bit that matters.

Until now the only way a reader could set that preference was to find the little star icon next to Top Stories in a search result, search for your site and tick it. Nobody does that. What’s new is the button. Google now gives you a snippet of code to put on your own pages. A reader clicks it, confirms on a Google screen, and gets bounced straight back to where they were on your site. Takes about four seconds.

So what does it do for you? For each reader who presses it, your content gets a “preferred” badge and shows up more often in their results and AI answers when there’s something relevant to show. Google says readers have already picked more than 600,000 sources. It is, in plain terms, a follow button for Google Search.

What it isn’t

It isn’t a ranking boost. If nobody presses it, nothing changes. It won’t help you with people who have never heard of you. And it only works for readers signed in to a Google account, which is most people on mobile but not everyone on desktop. One more catch from Google’s documentation: only domain-level and subdomain-level sites are eligible. If your blog lives in a subdirectory of someone else’s domain, you can’t be preferred.

Who should bother

Anyone who publishes regularly and has readers who come back. That’s obviously news sites, but it’s also the accountant who writes a monthly tax update, the garden centre with a seasonal blog, the estate agent doing local market reports. If people already read your stuff, this turns a casual reader into someone Google keeps showing you to. If your site is six static pages and a contact form, skip it, there’s nothing for Google to prefer.

Setting it up on WordPress takes ten minutes. Google’s snippet goes in your theme, or via a code-snippet plugin if you’d rather not touch templates. We’d put it just under the post title or just before the comments, and we’d say what it does in a line of copy next to it, because “Add as preferred source” means nothing to most people.

It’s a follow button for Google. Treat it like one.

02 · Rolling out

Business Profile in Gemini

This one got far less coverage than the button and is probably more useful to most of the businesses we work with. Google’s November small business bulletin, posted on 5 November, confirmed you can now connect your Google Business Profile to Gemini. Not Gemini giving you generic writing help. Gemini actually plugged into your listing.

In practice that means you can ask it things grounded in your own business data and have it make changes for you. “Set the hours for Christmas week.” “Write a post about the winter boiler service offer.” “Draft a reply to the three-star review from Tuesday.” It drafts and, if you let it, makes the change. For a one-person trade business that currently updates its profile twice a year, that’s the difference between a listing that looks alive and one that doesn’t.

Same bulletin, two more things worth knowing. Google Maps now puts a Message button right next to Call, routing to WhatsApp or SMS, so if messaging is switched off on your profile you’ve just lost a button. And Google is starting to set holiday hours automatically using AI, which you’ll want to check rather than trust.

Caveats

Google’s own help page, as of this week, still says the Gemini connection needs a personal Google account rather than a work or school one, only works if you manage a single verified Business Profile, and only in the Gemini web app. The bulletin says Workspace is rolling out, and there have been reports of it working for multi-location accounts since the summer. The official page hasn’t caught up, so if it doesn’t work for you today, that’s probably why. If you run several locations, wait. One more thing to check: when Google first announced this in June the UK and EEA were excluded, so confirm it has actually reached your account.

What to do

Connect it, then use it to do the audit you’ve been putting off. Ask it what your profile currently says about your services, categories and hours and fix whatever’s wrong. Then turn messaging on and make sure a human sees the messages. Everything that follows in this post reads from that same profile data.

03 · Spotted in testing

ChatGPT business profiles

This one hasn’t launched, so a health warning first. On 6 November Juozas Kaziukėnas of Marketplace Pulse posted a screenshot of an unreleased ChatGPT page headed “Claim your business in ChatGPT”, marked as beta. OpenAI hasn’t announced it, and the details could change. But it lines up with where they’ve been heading with shopping and merchants, and it’s the first sign of something a lot of businesses have been asking for.

The page lists three things a verified business would get:

• See how your business shows up How often your business is mentioned in ChatGPT conversations. Think Search Console’s impressions report, but for AI answers. Right now nobody has this. It would be the first official measure of AI visibility from any platform.
• Show customers what you offer Keep your business details and latest products current. The Google Business Profile bit.
• Help customers make decisions A “business agent” that answers buyers’ questions using information you control. So when someone asks ChatGPT whether you do Saturday appointments, it checks with you rather than guessing from a page you wrote in 2021.

Verification appears to work by connecting an existing account, with Shopify given as the example. Whether that extends to a plain website or a Google Business Profile isn’t clear yet.

Get Quote is already live

While the profile is still in testing, one piece of ChatGPT for local services is already out. ChatGPT has been showing a Get Quote button on some local business cards when someone describes a job. A person asks about a leaking tap, ChatGPT names a few local plumbers, and eligible ones carry a button that opens a quote form without leaving the chat.

You can’t apply for this yourself. It runs through OpenAI’s local services programme, which is built for the platforms that already hold the leads. Yelp signed up in July, licensing its reviews and business data to OpenAI with its Request a Quote feature to follow. It’s US-led for now and UK coverage is patchy. But it tells you two things. Where ChatGPT gets its local data from, which is the directories, not your website. And that it leans hard on ratings: SOCi’s analysis puts the average rating of the businesses ChatGPT recommends at 4.3 stars, with the lowest-rated locations and those that don’t reply to reviews excluded altogether.

What it won’t do

It won’t make ChatGPT recommend you. That’s worth being blunt about, because the pitch from some agencies will be that it does. Google Business Profile is the closest comparison, and claiming your Google listing never made you rank. It fixed your facts and stopped you looking careless. Expect the same here. ChatGPT leans heavily on what other sites say about you, reviews, directories, articles, and a claimed profile doesn’t change that.

What to do now

Nothing to claim yet. But there’s prep work that pays off whether or not this launches in its current form, because it’s the same stuff ChatGPT already reads to describe you:

• Ask ChatGPT about yourself. Your business name, your services, “best [what you do] in [your town]”. Read what comes back and open every source it cites. That’s your current profile, whether you like it or not.
• Make your facts match everywhere. Website, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare. Same name, same address, same hours, same phone number. ChatGPT compares sources and mismatches cost you.
• Look after your rating. Slip well below four stars on the directories ChatGPT reads, or stop replying to reviews, and you’re out before the conversation starts. Ask happy customers to review you, and reply to the ones who weren’t.
• Check Bing can see you. ChatGPT search runs on Bing’s index. Most people have never looked at Bing Webmaster Tools. Look.
• Don’t block the crawler. OpenAI’s search bot is called OAI-SearchBot, and it’s separate from GPTBot, the training crawler. Some “block AI” settings in security and SEO plugins turn off both. If OAI-SearchBot is blocked, you won’t appear in ChatGPT’s search answers.
• Keep the Shopify or product feed tidy if you sell online. If verification does go via connected accounts, that’s likely the door in.

Where this goes

Google is already phoning businesses

If the three above feel small, here’s the one that shows the direction. Since July last year, in the United States, Google Search can phone a local business on a customer’s behalf. Someone types “find me a plumber who can come Saturday morning for under £150”, Google’s system rings round, asks about price and availability, and sends the customer a written summary. For businesses on a connected booking system it skips the call and books directly. It started with everyday local services, pet groomers being Google’s own example, which is to say the kind of businesses most of our local clients are.

It’s US only for now and there’s no date for the UK. But the mechanics are what matter. Before it dials, Google scores your Business Profile. Incomplete services, missing hours, no service area, and it skips you. Then it rings. If nobody answers, the job goes to the next name on the list and you never knew it existed. And the customer doesn’t see ten results and pick. The AI picks one and acts.

That’s the shift all of this is building towards. Ranking on page one stops being the goal. Being the single business the assistant chooses, with the data to back it up and a phone that gets answered, is the goal. Every item above feeds that: a profile that’s complete and current, facts that match everywhere, a rating that holds up, a way to message and book that actually works.

None of it is clever. It’s the boring work, done properly, and these tools reward exactly that and nothing else. Our AI search page covers what we do to get clients cited and chosen, and the journal has the longer version of how AI Overviews pick their sources.