Patients Are Asking ChatGPT About You. Here's What It Says.
Someone decided whether to call you last night, and you'll never know it happened. They didn't visit your website. They didn't read your reviews. They typed a question into an AI assistant - "who's a good option near me for this?" - read the answer, and moved on.
That's the shift. For years the whole game was ranking on Google so a person could click through to your site and decide for themselves. Now a growing slice of people ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or Google's own AI summaries, and they get one answer. Not ten blue links. One answer, written with total confidence, that they mostly trust.
So the question every local business owner should be asking in 2026 isn't only "where do I rank?" It's "what does AI say about me?" Because whatever it says is functioning as your first impression, and right now most owners have never checked.
Go find out right now - it takes ten minutes
This isn't theoretical and you don't need us to do it. Open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask the questions your customers actually ask. Not marketing questions. Customer questions:
"Who are the best options for [what you do] near [your town]?"
"Is [your business name] any good?"
"Does [your business name] take walk-ins?"
"What are [your business name]'s hours?"
"How much does [your main service] cost in [your area]?"
"What do people say about [your business name]?"
Write down what comes back. Three things are going to jump out, and they're the same three things we see almost every time we run this for a client.
First, you may not be mentioned at all when someone asks the generic "best near me" question - even if you rank fine in the map pack. Second, when you are mentioned, some of the details will be wrong. Old hours. A phone number from two moves ago. A service you stopped offering. A price range someone invented. Third, the answer will be thin. A sentence and a half, no reason to choose you over the other two names in the list.
Why AI gets your business wrong
AI assistants aren't reading your mind and they're definitely not reading your brochure. They're assembling an answer from whatever is publicly written about you in text form: your website copy, your Google Business Profile, directory listings, review sites, news mentions, Facebook, old press releases, aggregator pages you didn't know existed.
Which means two rules follow, and they explain almost everything:
If it isn't written down somewhere public, AI can't say it about you.
If it's written wrong somewhere public, AI will happily repeat it.
That's the whole mechanism. The practice that never wrote its insurance list on its website gets "you should call to confirm" as its AI answer. The shop whose old hours are still sitting on three directory sites gets the old hours. The business whose site is gorgeous but built almost entirely out of images and sliders - with barely any actual text - gets skipped, because there's nothing to read.
That last one stings the most. We've reviewed beautiful sites that, stripped of their design, contain about forty words of real information. A human sees polish. A machine sees an empty room.
The good news: this is fixable, and it's not a new marketing channel
Here's what we tell owners who are bracing for another line item: you don't need an "AI strategy." You need your public information to be complete, consistent, and written in plain sentences. That's it. The work that makes AI describe you accurately is the same work that makes your website convert and your map pack listing win. One effort, three payoffs.
Five fixes, in the order we'd do them
1. Answer the boring questions in writing. Hours. Location and parking. Phone number. Whether you take walk-ins or need appointments. What you charge or at least a range. Payment and insurance details. New-customer process. These are the questions people actually ask an AI, and if the answer lives only in your front desk staff's heads, no assistant can relay it. Put them on your site as text - a real FAQ page with real questions as headings, not a PDF, not an image.
2. Clean up your Google Business Profile. It's free, it's heavily weighted by both search and AI answers, and it's the single most commonly neglected asset we find. Complete every field. Correct categories. Real services with descriptions. Hours including holidays. Photos. Q&A section filled in by you. If you do nothing else this month, do this.
3. Hunt down wrong information. Search your business name and your phone number and see what comes up. Old directory entries, an abandoned Facebook page, a listing from a previous owner or previous address. Each one is a source an AI might quote. Claim or correct what you can; the goal is that every public mention of your name, address, and phone matches exactly.
4. Write pages a machine can read. Clear headings phrased as questions. Short paragraphs with the answer in the first sentence. Service pages that name the service, the town, who it's for, and what it costs. Skip the poetry. "We provide comprehensive solutions tailored to your unique needs" tells a machine nothing, and honestly it tells a human nothing either.
5. Keep the reviews coming and respond to them. Review text is one of the richest sources an AI has for describing what you're actually like. Twelve reviews from 2023 gives it almost nothing to work with. A steady stream of recent reviews that mention specific services, specific staff, and specific outcomes gives it the raw material to say something better than "appears to be well regarded."
What "good" looks like when you re-test
Re-run your ten-minute test a month after you've done the work. You're looking for three changes. The details should be right. You should show up in at least some of the generic "best near me" questions. And the description should have substance - specific services, a reason to pick you, accurate practical info a person could act on.
That third one is the real prize. There's a big difference between an AI saying "there are several options in the area, including yours" and an AI saying "this one handles this specific thing, takes new customers, is open Saturdays, and reviewers consistently mention short wait times." The second answer books an appointment. And you wrote it, just not in the place you expected.
The part nobody wants to hear
This won't hold still. Assistants change how they source answers, new ones appear, and the details drift as your business changes and old listings resurface. Checking what AI says about you belongs on the same quarterly list as checking your hours are right and your forms still send email. Twenty minutes, four times a year.
We'd also gently push back on the panic framing you've probably seen. AI search isn't the end of local marketing. It's a new referee applying the same old standard: is your information complete, consistent, current, and clearly written? Businesses that were already doing that are showing up fine. Businesses that were coasting on a pretty site and a stale listing are the ones getting left out of the answer - and they were already losing customers for the same reason, just more slowly.
Want us to run the test for you?
We do this for clients as part of our regular work: ask the AI assistants the real customer questions, log exactly what they say, and fix the sources that are feeding bad answers. If you'd rather see your own report than spend the afternoon interrogating a chatbot about yourself, we're happy to run it.
Brummble is a digital marketing agency in Rochester, NY working with medical practices, restaurants, and local service businesses. Call us at 585-802-1377 or reach out at brummble.com and we'll show you what AI is telling your next customer about you.
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