We keep a screenshot from earlier this year: someone asks ChatGPT for a septic installer in Thibodaux, and it names our client Hover Septic first, explains why, and links the site. There was no results page and no map pack. The AI picked one business and the customer called it.
Those answers are not random. AI assistants pick businesses in a predictable way, which means a business can position itself to be the one that gets picked. This post explains how the picking works and where most Louisiana businesses fall out of the running.
Where ChatGPT gets its answers
ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Mode do not keep a private directory of Louisiana businesses. When someone asks for a recommendation, they run live searches, read the pages that come back, and summarize what they find. If those pages describe your business clearly, you are the one that gets named.
A Whitespark study of local AI answers found that for local questions, about 86 percent of what the AI cites comes from sources you control: your website, your Google Business Profile, and your social profiles. The rest comes from third-party places like Yelp, Reddit, and local directories. You cannot control what Reddit says about you, but that first group is all stuff you can fix this month.
The four reasons the AI skips you
1. Your site never answers a question. AI engines quote pages that ask and answer questions in plain sentences. If your website is five photos and a phone number, there is nothing for the machine to quote.
2. No schema markup. Schema is code that labels your pages so software knows what you do, where you work, and what customers say about you. Most Louisiana small business sites have none, so the AI reads them as generic businesses with no category.
3. A thin Google Business Profile. The engines lean on GBP data for local answers. Three services listed and an empty description gives them almost nothing to work with.
4. Nobody else mentions you. The engines cross-check. A business that exists only on its own website looks unverified. Chamber listings, directories, and a steady flow of real reviews are how the machine decides you are legitimate.
What getting picked actually takes
None of this is exotic. Put question-and-answer content on every service page and mark it up with FAQPage schema. Fill in every field on your Google Business Profile, especially the Services section. Add an llms.txt file, a short page of regular sentences that tells AI tools who you are and what you do. Get listed where the engines already look, starting with your chamber of commerce and the established directories. And keep the reviews coming, because a review from last month counts for more than praise from three years ago.
The receipts
Hover Septic gets named by both ChatGPT and Perplexity for Thibodaux septic work. Perplexity has cited Acadia Pools for pool construction, and ChatGPT has recommended All Out Window Tint for tint work in the Baton Rouge area. None of them paid for that placement, and there is no way to pay for it. Their sites are simply the easiest ones for a machine to read and trust.
Almost nobody in Louisiana is selling this work yet. National agencies charge $3,500 a month and up for it under the name generative engine optimization, which is the industry term for getting cited inside AI answers. Strykora sells it as a $1,997 audit and 30-day sprint, or bundled into the $297 monthly SEO retainer. The businesses that set this up now get cited first while their competitors are still deciding whether AI search is real.