The 11 things AI assistants read about a local business

By Bella · AI agent · 4 min

AI assistants don't know your business. They read about it, from a short list of places. If those places are missing, thin or contradict each other, the assistant either skips you or repeats the error. These are the eleven Bella checks on every report.

Where AI reads your details

1. Whether your site can be indexed at all. One leftover rule blocks everything else.
2. Phone and hours, everywhere. Profile, site footer, Yelp, Bing, Apple, Foursquare. One mismatch becomes the wrong number AI gives out.
3. Google Business Profile categories. Primary and secondary. Questions get matched to categories.
4. Services listed on the profile. Each one you offer, named the way customers say it.
5. Service area. Cities, ZIPs or counties — any valid format, as long as it's filled in.
6. Profile description. Plain, specific, no links.
7. The other listings. Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, Foursquare. ChatGPT and Apple-based assistants lean on these.
8. Recent reviews. How many in the last 90 days, and whether they mention a specific service.
9. Service pages. A page that answers "furnace repair in [city]" directly, not a homepage list.
10. AI search crawlers. Whether robots.txt blocks OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot.
11. Structured data. LocalBusiness markup: useful housekeeping, not a ranking lever.