Ask Gemini or ChatGPT for “a good electrician in Ballina” and look at who gets named. In our experience it’s rarely the business with the flashiest website. It’s usually the one with a complete Google Business Profile, a steady stream of reviews and a category that matches the question.
That makes sense once you see where these tools get local information from. Your profile isn’t just the box that shows up on Maps any more. It’s one of the main data sources AI tools use to describe your business to strangers.
Where AI answers about local businesses come from
Google is fairly open about this for its own products. Its guide to optimising for generative AI features says Business Profiles “can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results.” So when AI Overviews or AI Mode answer a local question, the listing you manage in Google Business Profile is part of what they draw on.
Other tools are less transparent, but the trail leads to the same place. Independent research by Peec AI into where ChatGPT’s search results come from found its local answers draw on Google Maps listings, plus licensed partners like Yelp and TripAdvisor. In regional Australia, where Yelp barely registers, your Google listing carries most of that load.
The practical upshot: if your profile is thin, out of date or in the wrong category, AI tools have very little to say about you, and they’ll happily say more about the business down the road.
What an AI tool can read from your profile
A person scanning your listing looks at the star rating and the photos. A language model reads everything as text and builds a description from it. These are the fields we check, roughly in order of how much they matter.
Primary category. This is the single biggest signal of what you are. “Electrician” and “Electrical installation service” are both options, and they don’t always surface for the same questions. Pick the one that matches how customers describe you, then add secondary categories for the other work you do.
Services. Most profiles we audit have either no services listed or a handful of default ones. Add every service you want to be found for, with a short plain description. “Switchboard upgrades for older homes, including ceramic fuse replacement” gives an AI tool something to match against a question. A bare “Switchboards” gives it much less.
Business description. You get 750 characters. Use the first two sentences to say what you do, for whom and where. Skip the mission statement. Something like: “Licensed electrician servicing Ballina, Lennox Head and Alstonville. Residential repairs, switchboard upgrades, solar and battery installs, and same-week callouts for homeowners and property managers.”
Service area and address. If you work from home and travel to customers, set a service area and hide the address. List the towns you genuinely cover. Don’t list Brisbane because you once did a job there.
Hours, including public holidays. AI tools answer “who’s open now” questions. Wrong hours lead to a bad experience, and a bad experience becomes a review.
Attributes. Things like wheelchair accessible entrance, online appointments or identifies as women-owned. They’re small, but they answer the very specific questions people now type into AI tools (“physio in Lismore with wheelchair access”).
Photos. Models increasingly read images as well as text, and photos of real jobs, real vans and real staff support everything else on the profile. Stock photos add nothing.
If you haven’t been through the basics in a while, our complete Google Business Profile setup guide covers every field.
Reviews: the words matter more than the stars
Google’s own help page on how local ranking works says results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence, and that “more reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking.”
AI tools add another layer. They don’t just count your stars, they read the review text and summarise it. If twenty reviews mention that you turned up on time and cleaned up after yourself, that’s the description a stranger hears. If your reviews just say “great service”, there’s nothing specific to repeat.
You can’t write reviews for customers, and you shouldn’t script them. What you can do is ask in a way that prompts detail. Instead of “Could you leave us a review?”, try:
“Thanks for having us out to fix the hot water. If you’ve got a minute, a Google review mentioning what we did really helps other people in Lennox find us.”
That naturally produces reviews that mention the job and the town, which is exactly the material an AI answer gets built from.
Reply to reviews too. Your replies are public text attached to your listing. A reply that says “Glad the switchboard upgrade went smoothly, and thanks for choosing us for your Cumbalum renovation” reinforces what you do and where, without stuffing keywords. Keep it sincere. Reply to the bad ones calmly and briefly, and take the detail offline.
Keep the profile and your website saying the same thing
AI tools cross-check. If your profile says you do solar installs but your website never mentions solar, the claim looks weaker. If your profile has one phone number and your website another, that’s a reason for a tool to trust neither.
On our websites for tradies, we write the service pages and the profile’s services together so they match. It’s less about any single setting and more about every source telling the same story, which we cover in more detail in how AI tools judge trust.
A 30-minute monthly routine
You don’t need to live in your profile. Once it’s set up properly, this is enough:
- Check hours for any upcoming public holidays or closures and set special hours.
- Upload 3 to 5 new photos of real work from the past month.
- Reply to every new review, good and bad.
- Send review requests to the customers you finished jobs for this month, using wording that prompts detail.
- Read your services list and description once. Add anything new you’ve started offering.
- Check the Performance section in Business Profile for calls, direction requests and website clicks, and jot the numbers down so you can compare month to month.
If someone else manages the profile for you, ask for those numbers each month. If they can’t produce them, that tells you something too.
Where to start
If your profile has never had its services list filled in, start there. It’s the gap we see most often, and it takes an hour.
For tradies who’d rather have the profile, website and service pages built to match from day one, that’s what the Local SEO Build on tradie.agency is for. Other businesses can talk to us about ongoing local SEO and Business Profile management.