The question I keep being asked, in one form or another, is what a small business should be doing about AI answers. Most of the advice on offer is speculative.
Google published something in July that is definitive, and I have not seen anyone mention it. The company now states in its own developer documentation that a Google Business Profile helps you appear in AI responses.
What Google says
Google’s guide to optimizing for generative AI features, last updated July 10, 2026, is worth reading if you have time. For a local business, this is the line that matters most:
Using products like Merchant Center (such as Merchant Center feeds) and Google Business Profiles can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results.
That is Google’s own documentation, not a vendor’s reading of it. A great deal is being asserted about AI search this year on very little evidence, and this is one of the few claims that comes straight from the source.
The same page is unusually blunt about what does not work. You do not need an llms.txt file, you do not need your content broken into chunks, and you do not need a separate AI-facing rewrite of your copy. Google says these carry no ranking benefit. If you have been pitched any of the three this year, that page is your answer.
The category field is the part most businesses set once and forget
If the Business Profile is an input, the category field is the biggest single thing in it that you control. Google’s help documentation describes what it does:
Your business categories inform your customers about what your business does. It helps your business connect you with customers who search for your products or services.
The example Google gives is a pizza restaurant, which it says might be shown for searches like Restaurants, Italian Restaurants, or Pizza. The category decides which searches you are eligible to appear in at all.
Google gives two pieces of guidance on choosing categories, and they pull in opposite directions. Be specific: “instead of ‘Salon,’ choose ‘Nail salon.'” And be sparing: “Do not select a category for every product or service.” You get one primary category and up to nine additional ones. That is more room than most businesses use, and far less than they would use if they treated the field as a keyword list.
Why the primary category carries more weight than almost anything else
Whitespark publishes a Local Search Ranking Factors report built from a survey of local search practitioners. The 2026 edition, published November 6, 2025, had 47 experts score 187 factors.
Primary GBP Category ranked first of all 187 factors for local pack and Maps rankings. Additional categories placed eighth.
This is expert opinion rather than a measurement of Google’s algorithm, and it is worth what an informed consensus is worth, which is something, but not everything. I still think 47 people who work in this every day putting the same field at the top of a 187-item list is worth doing something about, particularly since it costs nothing but attention.
Where it gets more complicated
The 2026 report added a new scoring dimension: how much each factor affects visibility in AI search responses. Darren Shaw, who runs the survey, wrote a note in the methodology about why that question was hard to ask:
For example, if I’m scoring a factor like “Google Business Profile Additional Categories”, then my score may be different depending on which AI search platform I’m thinking about. I would score it a zero for ChatGPT, but might score it a 3 for Google’s AI Mode & Gemini because Google would have access to this data.
The split between Google’s own AI and everyone else’s is missing from most of the coverage I have read, and I think it is the most useful part of this whole discussion. Your categories are a direct input to Google’s AI surfaces because Google holds the data. ChatGPT does not have your Business Profile. Whatever it knows about your business, it learned from the open web.
So what does reach the models Google does not own
The most substantial attempt to measure this that I have found comes from OppAlerts. They ran 403,000 prompts across 13 different AI models, covering 100 industries and 1,100 buyer personas. For each business the models named, they measured 18 technical signals about that business’s website, then looked at which signals tracked with getting recommended.
Pooled across every industry, on 98,546 observations, the signals correlating most strongly with an AI recommendation were:
- SE Outbound Links, +0.331
- Homepage Keywords, +0.204
- Domain PageRank, +0.192
- PageRank History, +0.183
- Search Engine Appearances, +0.165
Most of those measure one of two things: how visible a site already is in search results, and how many other sites link to it. So the work that makes you visible in ordinary search overlaps heavily with what these models appear to respond to. That part is reassuring, because it means most local businesses are not starting from zero.
But every one of those correlations is weak, and the study says so itself. The numbers run low by their nature, because a business that dominates one industry is absent from the other ninety-nine. A correlation of +0.331 describes a tendency, not a lever you pull. Anyone selling you a guaranteed AI visibility outcome is working from numbers that do not support the guarantee.
I have seen this study summarized as showing that appearing in Google’s results at all is the strongest predictor of being recommended by AI. The pooled table does not quite say that; search engine appearances sit fifth. The general shape of the finding survives the correction, and the precise claim does not. That pattern describes a good deal of what is being written about AI search right now.
What I would do this quarter
Open your Business Profile and read the primary category as if you were a customer. If it says Manufacturer and you sell custom kitchen cabinets, or it says Contractor and you do roofing, you are eligible for a much broader and much less relevant set of searches than the one you want. Changing it takes a minute, and it is the single field the practitioner survey put first.
Then look at the additional categories with Google’s own guidance in mind: specific and few. Nine slots is a ceiling, not a target. Adding a category you do not serve tells Google to show you for searches you cannot convert.
Finally, get a baseline. Search Console now has a generative AI performance report, which gives you first-party impression data on how you appear in Google’s AI features. This month’s number will not tell you much. Having twelve of them next summer will, and there is no way to get that history retroactively.
None of this is the dramatic response to AI that the headlines seem to call for. It is a settings page in an account you already own, in the one product where Google has confirmed the connection in writing. I would do the confirmed thing first and keep watching the rest.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on your Business Profile categories, or want AI visibility added to your monthly reporting, get in touch and we can take a look.
