How AI assistants choose which local plumber to recommend

Ask an AI assistant like ChatGPT "who's the best emergency plumber in my town?" and you'll usually get a short list of names. If you run a plumbing business, the obvious question is: how do they decide?

The honest answer is that nobody outside these companies knows the exact recipe, and anyone who claims to is guessing. But the companies have published a fair amount about how their assistants find and read the web. This guide sticks to that public information, explains what it means for a local service business, and is clear about what is still unknown.

Two ways an assistant "knows" about you

It helps to separate two different things:

1. What the model learned in training. Large language models are trained on large amounts of text. A small local business may appear rarely or not at all, and training data has a cutoff date — so the model alone often can't give a reliable, current local answer.
2. What the assistant looks up right now. When web search is used, the assistant fetches current pages and listings and writes its answer from them, often with links to its sources. For "best plumber in [city]" questions, this live lookup is where a local business has the most influence.

You can't do much about the first. You can do a lot about the second.

What each company has said publicly

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

OpenAI documents a crawler called OAI-SearchBot and says it "is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features." It also states that sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links," and recommends allowing it in robots.txt if you want to appear. OpenAI treats this separately from GPTBot, which is used for training — so you can allow search while blocking training. (OpenAI crawler docs)

Takeaway for a plumber: if your website — or your hosting company's firewall — blocks OAI-SearchBot, your own site can't be one of the sources ChatGPT search reads.

Google (AI Overviews, AI Mode and Google's AI apps)

Google says that for AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search, "there are no additional requirements" and no special optimization needed — the same SEO fundamentals apply. Its own list of those fundamentals includes allowing crawling in robots.txt and by your CDN or host, making important content available as text, making sure structured data matches the visible page, and "checking that your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up-to-date." It also says these features may use a "query fan-out" technique, issuing multiple related searches to build an answer. (Google: AI features and your website)

Separately, Google documents a robots.txt token called Google-Extended. It controls whether content Google crawls may be used for training future Google AI models and for grounding in Google's AI assistant apps and Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI. Google says it does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search. (Google's common crawlers)

Takeaway: blocking Google-Extended doesn't remove you from Google Search, but by Google's own description it can limit use of your content for grounding answers in Google's AI assistant app. Decide deliberately rather than by accident.

What Google says about local ranking (and why it's relevant)

For regular local results on Google Maps and Search, Google says results are "mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity," and describes prominence as partly based on "how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have." It also says "businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results," and that there's no way to pay for a better local ranking. (Google Business Profile help)

To be clear: that page is about Google's local results, not about how ChatGPT or other assistants pick names. We're not claiming the assistants use the same formula. But the underlying ideas — being clearly relevant, accurately described, and well known on the web — are exactly the kinds of signals that would show up in whatever pages an assistant reads when it searches.

What a local plumber can actually do

Here's a practical list, each item tied to the public guidance above. None requires special "AI files" — Google explicitly says you don't need new machine-readable files or special schema for its AI features.

What's still unknown

• Exactly how each assistant weighs reviews, links, directories, or your own site when picking names.
• Which search sources each assistant uses behind the scenes for every query, and how often that changes.
• How much personalization or location affects a given person's answer.

Because of this, the only reliable way to know whether you're being recommended is to measure it repeatedly — the same questions, on a schedule — and watch what changes after you make fixes. The LocalCited audit is a one-time, dated sample of that: we ask ChatGPT about 28 questions a customer might ask about your type of business and city, on its public website, and report whether and how it mentions you. Answers vary from person to person and day to day, so treat any measurement as a snapshot, not a promise.

Sources

• OpenAI, "Overview of OpenAI Crawlers" — platform.openai.com/docs/bots
• Google Search Central, "AI features and your website" — developers.google.com
• Google, "List of Google's common crawlers" (Google-Extended) — developers.google.com
• Google Business Profile Help, "Tips to improve your local ranking on Google" — support.google.com

All sources read in October 2026. Providers change their documentation; check the linked pages for the current wording.