ChatGPT recommends the Moncton businesses the rest of the web already describes clearly. It reads your Google profile and reviews, the “best of” lists and directories other people publish, and the plain facts on your own site, then repeats what those sources agree on. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults found 45% now use AI for local recommendations, up from 6% (BrightLocal, 2026). Most of the fixes are free, and the first ones happen off your website.
That’s an American sample. I’d love a Canadian number and haven’t found one I trust yet, so treat it as a direction rather than a Moncton measurement.
Who does ChatGPT recommend when someone asks for the best [trade] in Moncton?
Whoever the sources agree on. Try it right now, before you read another word: open ChatGPT and type “who’s the best [your trade] in Moncton?” Then ask Copilot and Google’s AI Mode the same thing. Write down who comes up, and click the little source links under each answer to see where the names came from.
The usual result: three competitors appear and you don’t. When I looked at what gets cited for “best web designer in Moncton” this month, the same handful of sites kept turning up: ThreeBestRated, Clutch, The Manifest, TechBehemoths, Bark, DesignRush and the BBB.
Now the honest part. Ask the same question tomorrow and you may get a different list. The answers shift from run to run, and the sources behind them shift too. One preprint, cited in a 45-study review, found you’d need seven or eight repetitions of a question before the pattern means much; the reviewer is careful to say that figure comes from a small set of Swiss queries and isn’t a universal standard (Martinez, 2026). So one check proves nothing in either direction. Missing today? Run it a few more times over the week before you panic. Showing up? Same advice before you celebrate.
How do AI assistants pick which businesses to recommend?
Each one searches somewhere first, then writes a summary of what it found. Where it searches decides what you need to set up:
| Assistant | Where it looks | What to set up |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini | Google’s own search index and local data | Google Business Profile, Google Search Console |
| ChatGPT | OpenAI’s own crawler (OAI-SearchBot), plus third-party search, historically including Bing | Let OAI-SearchBot in; Bing Webmaster Tools |
| Microsoft Copilot | Bing | Bing Webmaster Tools, Bing Places |
| Perplexity | Its own index, leaning toward pages that already rank well in Google | Same as Google |
Across all of them, other people’s pages carry the most weight. In a study of 750 prompts about software, products and agencies, “best X” lists made up 43.8% of the page types ChatGPT cited (Ahrefs, 2025). Then Ahrefs ran an experiment on its own promotional pages through spring 2026 and tracked nearly 10,000 AI answers. For a new brand, 43% of the answers that cited the brand’s own page never mentioned the brand at all. For an established product, 94% of new mentions came from third-party content (Ahrefs, 2026). Ahrefs sells a tool for tracking exactly this, so weigh it accordingly, but the direction matches everything else I’ve read: what others say about you counts for more than what you say about yourself.
What others say about you counts for more than what you say about yourself.
Why doesn’t my business show up when people ask AI?
Usually because the assistant can’t find enough sources that agree on who you are, where you are and what you do. The common causes, roughly in order of how often I see them:
- A thin or unclaimed Google Business Profile, with a handful of reviews from 2022.
- No listing on the directories and “best of” pages the assistants lean on.
- A website that hides the facts. Prices in a PDF, “contact us for a quote” on every service, the city only in a footer image.
- A website the assistants can’t read: content that only appears after scripts load, or a crawler blocked by accident.
That last one happened to me. In August I found my own site’s robots.txt (the small file that tells crawlers what they may do) carrying a Cloudflare line that said ai-input=no: a request that AI tools not use my pages in their answers. On the website of a studio that helps people show up in AI answers. I flipped it to yes on August 8 and kept ai-train=no, since training and answering are separate permissions. The honest footnote: that line is a polite request nobody enforces, and the main crawlers were reaching my pages the whole time, so the flip probably changed nothing mechanically. But I’d been leaving a “no AI answers” sign on my own front door, and nobody noticed, me included. Check yours.
What should I fix first, and in what order?
Off-site first, because that’s where the assistants do most of their reading. Here’s my order, by payoff for the hours.
Your Google Business Profile, and reviews
This is the biggest lever for local answers, and it feeds Google’s AI features directly. Claim it, pick the right primary category, list your services in plain words, add real photos, post once a month. Then ask every happy customer from the last two years for a review, by name, in a short email with the link in it. Reviews are the bottleneck almost everywhere.
Other people’s lists and directories
Get onto the pages the assistants already cite. The bar in this province is low. When I checked on October 17, 2026, Clutch’s New Brunswick web designers page listed eight Moncton firms and only one had any rating. A free profile and three verified reviews would likely put you near the top of a page like that. Same goes for ThreeBestRated, TechBehemoths, the BBB and the Greater Moncton Chamber directory, depending on your trade.
One thing to skip: publishing your own “Best plumbers in Moncton” list with yourself at number one. The Ahrefs experiment above is the reason. The assistants read it, then often recommend the competitors on it.
Your facts, in plain text on your site
Write down what you do, where, for whom, and roughly what it costs, in words on the page. A controlled 2026 study found that putting business facts in plain text made AI answers 29.6% more accurate than leaving them in hidden markup alone (WordLift, 2026). Say “Moncton, New Brunswick” in a sentence. Type your service list out as words on the page. Publish a starting price if you can stomach it. My own prices sit on the pricing page for exactly this reason. If you run a nonprofit, the same rules apply to your programs and who they’re for; I wrote about that in what a nonprofit website in New Brunswick should include.
Most of the big assistants also read the HTML your server sends and skip the scripts. If your menu, prices or hours only appear after the page “loads in”, they may as well not exist. This is a five-minute check for whoever built your site.
Bing Webmaster Tools
An hour, free. Copilot runs on Bing, and Bing is still one of ChatGPT’s inputs. You can import your site straight from Google Search Console. Bonus: Bing’s AI Performance report shows when Copilot cites your pages, which makes it the only free report from any of these companies that counts citations (Bing, 2026).
Let OAI-SearchBot in
OpenAI is blunt about this one: “Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers” (OpenAI crawler docs, checked October 2026). Some security plugins and hosting settings block AI crawlers wholesale. Blocking GPTBot keeps your content out of training, which is a fair choice; just make sure OAI-SearchBot didn’t get blocked along with it.
Answer your customers’ questions on your own site
Write down the five questions people ask you on the phone, and answer each one on your site, with the question as the heading and the answer in the first sentence. “Do you service Shediac?” “How long does a new roof take?” “What does a first visit cost?” This is slower to pay off than everything above, and it’s the part that makes you the obvious answer for the narrow, local questions nobody else has written down.
What I’d do this week
Monday, your Google Business Profile. Tuesday, three review requests to customers who’d happily write one. Wednesday, Bing Webmaster Tools, and while you’re in there, ask whoever manages your site to check that OAI-SearchBot isn’t blocked. Then run the ChatGPT question once a day for a week and keep the answers in a note on your phone. That’s your before.
Expect this to take months. For a question like “best [trade] in Moncton”, I’d budget three to six months, and the movement will follow your reviews and listings more than anything you publish.
If you’d rather someone measured it properly, that’s what my Visibility Audit is for: $795 CAD, three weeks, two of them measurement. Fifteen questions your customers actually type, tracked for fourteen days across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode, reported per platform, plus a crawler check and a page-by-page list of the facts your site is hiding. It’s on the pricing page. If you’d rather hand over the fixes themselves, the Google profile, the listings and the robots file, that’s a job for a Fixer day. And if the site itself needs work, here’s how to choose a web designer in Moncton, me or anyone else, and what web design in Moncton looks like when I do it.
James Harper came to me with a self-built Wix site and no brand for Atlantic Thai Massage in Moncton. His words afterward: “I didn’t even know what I needed. Kate could read what was inside my heart and bring it to life. I now have a website and branding I’m truly proud of.” (His story is on the work page.) Getting named by ChatGPT gets people to your door. What they find when they arrive decides whether they come back, and whether they mention you to the next person. Being found is step one; being remembered is the job, and that’s what you have to be seen to be remembered is about.