How the recommendation gets made
When someone asks an assistant for a plumber in their area, the model is not exercising taste. It is assembling an answer from sources it can verify: business listings, review platforms, structured data on your site, and mentions across the web.
So the question is not how to persuade a model. It is whether the facts about your business are consistent, structured, and corroborated in the places it reads.
One: consistent business facts everywhere
Name, address, phone, hours, and service area identical across your site, your profiles, and every directory that lists you. Inconsistency is the most common reason a business gets omitted — a model with conflicting data about you will often just use someone else.
This is tedious and it is the single highest-return task on the list.
Two: structured data on your own site
Schema markup describing your business, your services, and your locations in a format machines read without interpretation. LocalBusiness, Service, and FAQ markup cover most of what a local business needs.
It is not a ranking trick. It is removing ambiguity, which is exactly what an answer engine is trying to resolve.
Three: reviews as corroboration
Volume and recency of reviews, and increasingly what those reviews say. Models summarize sentiment, so specific praise about specific services is doing work that a star rating alone does not.
Ask customers to mention what you did, not just that they were happy. It reads better to humans too.
Four: being mentioned where it matters
Local news, community sites, supplier and association pages, chambers, sponsorships. Not link building for authority — corroboration that you exist, operate where you say, and do what you claim.
A handful of genuine local mentions outperforms a hundred directory listings.
What not to do
Do not write content addressed to models. Do not buy "AI optimization" services promising placement in answers — there is no placement to buy.
The work is the fundamentals, done more carefully than most businesses bother to do them. That is genuinely all it is right now.