How to Get Your Trade Business Mentioned by ChatGPT and Google’s AI

When a customer asks ChatGPT for a good plumber, or Google’s AI answers their search before they ever see a normal result, some businesses get named and most do not. That is not luck, and it is not magic. In July 2026 Google published its official guide to optimising for generative AI search, and it settles most of the arguments.

How AI Search Actually Picks Businesses

Behind the scenes, AI search runs real searches. Google describes two mechanisms in its guide.

The first is retrieval augmented generation. Before answering, the AI uses Google’s normal ranking systems to pull relevant, current pages from the search index, reads them, and builds its answer from what it found. The second is query fan out: your customer asks one question, and the AI quietly turns it into several searches. Someone asking about a weedy lawn triggers background searches about herbicides, chemical free removal and prevention.

The punchline is in Google’s own words: optimising for generative AI search “is still SEO”. The AI is not a separate machine with separate rules. It sits on top of the same rankings you are already competing in. If your business is the strongest local answer in normal search, you are also the most likely business to be pulled into an AI answer.

That cuts both ways. If your website is thin, your profile is incomplete and your reviews are empty, no AI trick fixes that.

What Google Says You Can Ignore

A whole industry has appeared around AEO and GEO, answer engine and generative engine optimisation. Google’s guide has a section literally called mythbusting. These are the things it says you do not need:

• llms.txt files and special AI markup. Google states plainly that Google Search does not use them. Creating one neither helps nor harms you.
• “Chunking” your content for AI. There is no requirement to break pages into fragments so machines can read them.
• Rewriting your copy for AI systems. The systems understand synonyms and meaning. You do not need to capture every phrasing of every question.
• Buying mentions around the web. Google says seeking inauthentic mentions is not as helpful as it might seem, and its spam systems sit underneath the AI features.
• Special schema for AI. Structured data is not required for generative AI search. Keep using it for normal rich results, but there is no secret AI markup.

The Six Things Actually Worth Doing

1. Get your Google Business Profile complete and active

Google’s guide names Business Profiles as one of the ways local businesses become visible in AI responses as well as normal results. Correct categories, services, service areas, photos and hours. This is the single highest leverage item on the list. Our Google Business Profile guide covers the full setup.

2. Build detailed, genuine reviews

Our reading, offered as our reading: AI systems process the text of reviews, not just the star count. A review that says “rebuilt our retaining wall in Preston, tidy work, fair price” tells a machine what you do and where you do it. A bare five stars tells it nothing. Ask every happy customer for an honest, detailed review. Never tell them what to write and never offer anything for it, which Google treats as fake engagement.

3. Give every main service its own page

Google’s guide pushes hard on what it calls non commodity content: pages with first hand knowledge that could not have been written by anyone. A generic “7 landscaping tips” page is commodity. A page about your own drainage jobs, with your photos and what the jobs actually involved, is not. AI systems looking for something worth citing have nothing to take from the first and plenty from the second.

4. Keep your business details identical everywhere

Same business name, same phone number, same suburb across your website, your Google profile and every directory. Machines cross check. Contradictions cost trust, human and artificial.

5. Publish something only you can publish

First hand beats generic every time, and it is the reason we run our own studies instead of rewriting other people’s blogs. Our study of 2,444 tradie websites exists because original findings are what both people and AI systems cite. You have an equivalent: your jobs, your suburbs, your before and afters, the questions your customers actually ask.

6. Make sure Google can crawl and index your site

To appear in Google’s AI features a page must be indexed and eligible for normal search, per the guide’s technical requirements. Fast loading, mobile first, nothing blocked. If Google cannot read your site, its AI cannot mention you.

How to Check If It Is Working

Search Console now has a Generative AI performance report showing how your content appears in Google’s AI features. That is the real measurement.

You can also simply ask ChatGPT or Google about your trade in your suburb and see who gets named. Treat that as a spot check, not a report card: AI answers vary between sessions and phrasings, so one good or bad answer proves nothing on its own.

Why Now

2x more Australians now name AI as their main way to find information online than a year ago (Telsyte, 2026). The behaviour shift is real and it is fast.

Honesty matters here: for most tradies, AI referrals are still a small trickle today. Our own data shows barely any AI driven queries yet. The reason to act now is not that the traffic has arrived. It is that everything on the list above takes months to compound, costs nothing extra if you are doing SEO properly anyway, and the businesses that are citable when the traffic does arrive will be the ones that started early.

Sources

• Google Search Central: Optimizing your website for generative AI features (updated July 2026)
• Google Search Console Help: Generative AI performance report
• Google Search spam policies
• Telsyte Australian digital consumer research, 2026

Methodology: where these numbers come from

Our own data. Figures labelled as ours come from Google Maps business listings for Australian trade businesses, collected via Scrap.io in August 2026 and deduplicated on Google Place ID. For businesses with a linked website we read publicly accessible homepage metadata: the HTML title and meta description. Google review counts and location fields were taken from the listing data at the time of collection. Every figure is a count from that dataset, not an estimate. Full method in our study of 2,444 tradie websites.

This guide reports what Google's published guidance says. It makes no claim about our own AI referral results, because we do not yet have meaningful data to report.

Claims attributed to Google are quoted from Google’s own published documentation, linked in the sources below and checked on the date this guide was last updated.

Limitations

Honest data comes with edges. Here are ours.

• The dataset was filtered to businesses that already have a website, so it says nothing about how many tradies have no website at all.
• Geography is mixed across Australian states and skews away from a pure Melbourne sample.
• Google review counts are banded, not exact, so we report how many have zero or 50 or more and never quote an average.
• Each homepage was read once, at one point in time.
• Google documentation describes how its systems are intended to work. It does not promise any particular outcome for your site.

Sources

• Google Search Central: optimizing for generative AI features on Google Search
• Google Search Console Help: Generative AI performance report
• Google Search Central: guidance on third-party SEO tools and advice
• Telsyte Australian digital consumer research, 2026