Ask ChatGPT for “a good salon in Riverside that does bridal” and it won’t crawl the web in real time like Google. It leans on what it already knows, plus a quick search when it needs to. Either way, it is looking for the same thing: a business it can describe in a sentence without guessing.
That sentence is built from facts. Your name, what you do, where you are, when you’re open, and what people say about you. If those facts match across your site, Google profile, Yelp and social, the assistant is confident. If they disagree, or if one of them is missing, it quietly picks someone else.
Three things move the needle fastest. First, a page that states the basics plainly: category, city, hours, phone, booking link. Second, a handful of questions answered in your own words (“Do you take walk-ins?”). Third, reviews with specifics, because “great balayage, booked with Maya” tells an assistant far more than “5 stars”.
A Spotlight page publishes all three as structured data, so assistants read it the way they read a knowledge base rather than a brochure. Run the AI check once a week and watch which questions you win.