What belongs on a local SEO checklist?

How do AI assistants pick local businesses?

When an assistant answers a local question, it leans on the same kinds of sources it uses everywhere: directories, review sites, local press, roundups ("the 10 best coffee shops in..."), and threads where locals recommend each other. Your own website is where it checks what you do; the third-party pages are where it decides whether you are worth naming.

That has three practical consequences:

1. Listings and reviews do double duty. The same directory entry that feeds Google's prominence is a page an assistant may quote. Wrong hours on a directory become wrong hours in an answer.
2. Local roundups matter. If the "best of" articles for your town name competitors and not you, the assistant will too. A friendly, factual note to the author, with a reason you belong on the list, is legitimate work.
3. Consistency is how you get recognised. An assistant that sees three versions of your name may not connect them into one business.

What if you serve customers at their address?

Plumbers, cleaners, movers and mobile services often have no storefront customers visit. Google handles them as service-area businesses: you set the areas you serve on the Business Profile and can hide your street address. The checklist still applies, with three adjustments.

• Service areas, not a pin. List the towns or regions you actually cover. Listing a whole country to look bigger makes the profile less relevant everywhere.
• Pages per area only when there is something to say. A page per town is worth it if the work, prices, regulations or response times genuinely differ there, or if you can show real jobs done in that area. Otherwise one strong service page and a clear list of areas does more than twenty thin ones.
• Reviews that name the place. A review that mentions the town and the job ("fixed a burst pipe in Tartu on a Sunday") is useful evidence to a reader and to an assistant asked for someone in that town.

What are the most common local SEO mistakes?

• Keyword-stuffed business names. Adding "Best Cheap Plumber Tallinn" to the profile name breaks Google's guidelines and can get the profile suspended.
• Duplicate profiles. Two profiles for one location split reviews and confuse everyone. Merge or remove the duplicate.
• Fake or incentivised reviews. Against the platforms' rules, easy to spot, and a lasting risk.
• Ignoring the bad review. An unanswered complaint is read by every future customer, and by every assistant that summarises your reviews.
• A website that disagrees with the profile. Different hours or a different phone number on the site tells everyone, people and machines, that one of them is wrong.

What should you do first?

If you only have an afternoon, do these four things in order. Together they touch all three of Google's factors and show you where the AI layer stands.

• 1

  What you do

  Verify the Business Profile and fix its primary category

  What it feeds

  Relevance

• 2

  What you do

  Make name, address and phone identical on the profile and your site

  What it feeds

  Prominence, and whether an assistant connects the two

• 3

  What you do

  Answer every unanswered review

  What it feeds

  Prominence, and the review summaries assistants write

• 4

  What you do

  Ask three AI assistants who they recommend for your main service in your area

  What it feeds

  Your baseline for check 12

What does the AI step look like for a business outside the US?

A worked example. Take a plumbing firm in Tallinn that wants to know whether ChatGPT recommends it for "torulukksepp Tallinnas" (plumber in Tallinn), and set it up in Attensira with Estonia as its market and Estonian as its language. The table at the top of this page is what the product would and would not read for it, as of 4 October 2026.

Walk it row by row. The tracked Google searches are read from Estonia, in Estonian, because Estonia is one of the 14 countries with its own search location: the firm gets daily positions and a record of whether an AI Overview appeared. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI and Gemini are a different story. Estonia is not among the 42 countries those engines can be read from locally. Because Estonia is the firm's primary market, they are still read every day on every model, just not from Estonia, and each carries a note that its answers may not be local; the Estonian readings are also never compared with another market on those engines. Had Estonia been a second market added beside, say, Finland, those four engines would instead show "not measured" for Estonia, with the reason, and never as zero. Claude is read through its API with "User location: EE" stated in the question, which tells the firm how Claude answers someone who says they are in Estonia; it is labelled as exactly that, not as a local search.

Two lessons carry over to any country. First, check where each number was read before you trust it; an answer read from another country is a different answer. Second, for a market the tools cannot read locally, check 12 by hand, asking the assistants from a phone in your own town, is still the most honest local reading you have.

What can Attensira do for a local business, and what can it not?

We will be precise here, because local is a place where tools overclaim.

What it does. Attensira reads the questions your buyers ask on AI engines every day and records who each answer names and which pages it cites. It reads them country by country: a workspace can hold up to five markets, each a country with an optional language, so a business serving Germany and Austria can read the German questions in German. It reads tracked Google searches daily as a desktop search in your workspace's country and language, and records whether an AI Overview appeared. Fourteen countries have their own search location today, among them the US, the UK, Germany and India; a workspace in any other country is searched from the US, in English, and every reading records where it was searched. Its agents then do the work on the pages that decide your answers, and directory listings it prepares always wait for your yes.

What it does not do. It does not read answers or rankings at city or neighbourhood level, and it does not read Google's map pack. If your customers search "near me" within one city, pair a dedicated local rank tracker for the map results with Attensira for the AI answers. Its prefilled directory forms are software directories such as G2 and Capterra; local and industry directories are ones you file yourself.

If you serve several countries, the markets docs show how to read each one in its own language.