A few weeks ago I was talking to a dentist in New Jersey who has been practicing for twenty-two years. Great reviews. A loyal patient base. She told me she'd spent the previous weekend asking ChatGPT and Perplexity every dental question she could think of. "Best dentist for nervous patients near me." "Dentist who's good with kids in Morris County." "Where can I get a same-day crown?"
She didn't show up once. Not in ChatGPT. Not in Perplexity. Not in Google's AI Overview. Twenty-two years of excellent work, and as far as the AI was concerned, she didn't exist.
Her question was the same one we hear every week now: "What am I supposed to do about this?"
That's what this post is about — not the theory, but the specific, practical things that get a small business found by AI. And how Kora does them for you.
The new reality: people are asking AI instead of scrolling Google
If you haven't noticed this shift yet, you will soon. A growing number of your potential customers are skipping Google entirely. Instead of scrolling through ten blue links and a map, they open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's own AI Overview and ask a natural-language question. Not keywords — a full sentence, the way you'd ask a friend.
"Med spa with good Botox reviews in Scottsdale." "Best dentist for nervous patients near me." "Italian restaurant good for a large party in Westchester."
The AI gives back two or three names and a short explanation for each. No page two. No ads to scroll past. No map with fifteen pins. Just a short list of recommendations — and if your business isn't on it, nobody clicks through to find you.
We wrote our deep dive on SEO, AEO, and GEO to explain what these new channels are and why they matter. This post is the follow-up: here's exactly what to do about it.
How AI decides who to recommend
AI assistants don't have a ranking algorithm like Google does. They don't look at who paid for an ad. They build something closer to confidence — a sense of how much they trust a particular business for a particular question. That confidence comes from a handful of signals:
- Consistency. Is your business name, address, phone number, and hours the same everywhere — your website, your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Healthgrades, your booking platform? AI cross-references these. Mismatches erode trust.
- Structured information. Can a machine actually read what you offer? If your services or menu are locked inside a PDF or an image, the AI literally cannot parse them. It will recommend someone whose information is in plain text.
- Reviews with substance. The AI doesn't just count stars. It reads the words. A review that says "Dr. Patel was so patient with my daughter, who is terrified of dentists" is infinitely more useful to an AI answering "best dentist for nervous patients" than a review that says "Great!"
- Third-party mentions. Being talked about on sites you don't control — a local blog, a neighborhood Facebook group, a Reddit thread, a news article — builds the kind of independent corroboration AI models are trained to value.
- Direct answers on your site. If someone asks "does this med spa do lip filler?" and your website has a clear sentence that says yes, with pricing and details, the AI has something to quote. If your site is all stock photos and vague promises, it has nothing to work with.
None of this is mysterious. It's the digital version of what makes a good referral in real life: be consistent, be specific, and have other people say good things about you.
What Kora AI actually does about it
Knowing what signals matter is one thing. Doing the work is another. Most small business owners have maybe forty-five minutes a week for marketing, and that time gets eaten by posting an Instagram story and answering a bad review. The structural work that makes you visible to AI — fixing your schema markup, syncing your business info across twenty-three directories, rewriting your service pages so a machine can extract a clean answer — that work never rises to the top of the list.
That's why we built Kora. Here's what it does, specifically.
Structured data on your website
Kora adds and maintains the structured data markup (schema.org) on your site that tells AI systems exactly what your business is, what you offer, where you are, and when you're open. This is the behind-the-scenes code that most small business websites don't have — and it's one of the strongest signals AI uses to build confidence about you. Kora handles it automatically and keeps it updated when your hours change, when you add a service, when you move locations.
Consistent business info everywhere
Your name, address, phone number, hours, and categories need to match across Google, Yelp, Healthgrades, Bing, Apple Maps, Facebook, and dozens of other directories. When Kora finds a mismatch — and it almost always finds at least one — it flags it and helps you fix it. This is the kind of thing that sounds trivial until you realize your Google listing says you close at 8 and your website says 9, and an AI just told a potential customer you were closed.
AI-optimized content
Kora creates and updates content on your site that directly answers the questions people are asking AI. Not keyword-stuffed blog posts from 2019 — clear, factual, specific answers to the real questions your potential customers are typing into ChatGPT. "Do you take walk-ins?" "How much is a cleaning without insurance?" "What's the recovery time for micro-needling?" Kora puts those answers on your site in a format that AI can extract and quote.
Review management
Kora monitors your reviews across platforms and helps you respond in a way that adds useful information, not just "Thanks for the kind words!" When a patient writes about their experience getting a dental implant, Kora helps you craft a reply that naturally includes details about your implant process, your comfort measures, and your follow-up care. That reply becomes part of what the AI reads next time someone asks about implants in your area.
Google Business Profile optimization
Your Google Business Profile is the single most important asset in local AI visibility, and most businesses are using maybe 30% of its features. Kora fills in every field, updates your attributes, adds relevant categories, posts updates, and makes sure your profile sends every possible signal that you are a real, active, trustworthy business. This matters for traditional Google search. It matters even more for AI.
What you can check right now, in five minutes
You don't need Kora to do a basic reality check. Here's what I tell every business owner who asks where to start.
- Ask the AI about yourself. Open ChatGPT and Perplexity. Ask them the question your ideal customer would ask. "Best med spa for Botox in [your city]." "Dentist who's good with anxious patients near [your neighborhood]." "Best [your cuisine] restaurant in [your town]." See if you show up. See who does.
- Check your hours in three places. Look at your Google Business Profile, your website, and one other listing (Yelp, Healthgrades, your booking platform). Do the hours match? In our experience, about half the businesses we check have at least one mismatch.
- Read your last five reviews. Not for the star rating — for the words. Do they mention specific services? Specific experiences? Those details are what AI latches onto. If all your reviews say "Great place!" without any detail, the AI has nothing to work with.
- Try to find your services in text on your site. Not in a PDF. Not in an image of a menu. Actual text on an actual web page. If a search engine can't highlight it, an AI can't read it.
If any of those checks came back wrong, you're not alone. Most small businesses have gaps in at least two of them. That's the starting point.
The window of opportunity
Here's the thing that keeps me up at night on behalf of the businesses we work with: this window won't stay open.
Right now, AI search is still forming its opinions about local businesses. The models are building their sense of who's trustworthy, who's good at what, who should be recommended for which kinds of questions. If you get your information structured and consistent now — while most of your competitors haven't — you get a head start that compounds over time.
This is not like SEO in 2010, where you could ignore it for five years and then catch up. AI recommendations tend to be self-reinforcing. The businesses that get recommended first get more traffic, more reviews, more mentions — which makes them more likely to be recommended again. The early movers pull ahead, and the gap gets harder to close.
Kora exists because we saw this coming and realized most small businesses wouldn't have the time, the technical knowledge, or the budget to do it themselves. A med spa owner in Dallas shouldn't have to learn what schema markup is. A dentist in New Jersey shouldn't have to audit twenty directories by hand. A restaurant owner shouldn't have to become an AI prompt engineer to figure out why ChatGPT is recommending the place down the street.
Kora does it for them. Quietly, continuously, and for a fraction of what an agency would charge.
If you're curious where your business actually stands with AI search engines, Kora runs a free visibility scan that takes about sixty seconds. No call, no credit card, no commitment. Just a clear picture of what the AI sees when someone asks about businesses like yours — check your AI visibility score.