Best Of Lists and AI Search: Why Your Competitor Gets Named Instead of You

You did the sensible things. You have a website, a Google Business Profile with a healthy pile of reviews, and customers who send their friends your way. Then one of those customers mentions, almost as a joke, that they asked ChatGPT for a recommendation before booking you. It gave them three names. Yours was not one of them.

That stings. It should, a little. But it is also fixable, and the fix is not what most of the people emailing you about "AI visibility" will try to sell you.

I want to walk you through where those three names actually came from, the two traps that catch well-meaning owners, and the handful of things that genuinely move the needle. No jargon you do not need. Just the mechanics, and what to do about them.

Where the AI Got Those Three Names

You might assume the AI looked at every business in your area and picked the best. It did not. Instead, it read a handful of pages about your area and summarised them.

Some of those pages are business websites. Others are directories. And a surprising number are "best of" articles: the "7 Best Dog Trainers Near You" or "Top 10 Cafés in Town" pieces that you have probably scrolled past without a second thought.

BrightLocal ran 800 local searches through ChatGPT across 20 business types and recorded the sources it pulled from ^[1]. Almost six in ten of those sources were business websites. Over a quarter were what they called business mention sites, pages that talk about businesses without being a directory. Roughly one in seven were directories, and the single most common directory was a "best rated" style ranking site. That study is US-based and dates from late 2024, so treat the exact split as a guide, not gospel. The shape of it is what matters.

When one list speaks for the whole town

It gets stranger. In August, the local search specialist Joy Hawkins spotted Google's AI Overviews quoting a single lawyer's self-promoting listicle as the source for every law firm in a local result, as Search Engine Roundtable reported ^[2]. One article, from one author with an obvious interest, and Google's AI treated it as the voice of the whole market.

So what does that mean for you? It means a list you have never read, written by someone you have never met, may be deciding whether you get mentioned. That is the uncomfortable part. The useful part is that lists can be found, read and, in many cases, influenced honestly.

Why This Matters More This Year

You could shrug at this if hardly anyone used AI to find a local business. A year ago, that was close to true.

It is not now. BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey found a little under half of US consumers had used an AI tool for local business recommendations, up from a small single-digit share the year before, with ChatGPT used by roughly three in ten ^[3]. Again, that is a US sample of around a thousand people, and Irish habits tend to run a little behind American ones. But the direction is not in doubt, and you know as well as I do how quickly "nobody does that" becomes "everybody does that".

The booking you never hear about

Take a composite case built from conversations I have had with owners this year. A dog trainer in Kildare runs puppy classes out of a converted barn. Good reputation, full Saturday sessions, a waiting list in spring. A new client mentions on the first evening that ChatGPT gave her three trainers, none of them this one, and she only came because her sister insisted.

Think about that for a second. That client found her way in anyway. The ones without a sister did not. They booked one of the three names, and the trainer will never know they existed. There is no missed call and no bounced email, just lost leads that leave no trace in any report you own.

That is the real cost. Not a bad review, not a complaint. Silence.

The First Trap: Writing Your Own Best Of List

When owners hear that AI reads "best of" articles, the obvious response is to publish one. "The 5 Best Dog Trainers in the Area", with yourself at number one. I understand the instinct. Agencies have been selling exactly this for a couple of years.

The evidence says it backfires more often than it works.

Lily Ray, who leads SEO research at the agency Amsive, tracked 100 "best software" queries in Google's AI Overviews over several months. Self-promotional listicles were cited hundreds of times, but in roughly seven out of ten of those citations, Google recommended a different brand from the list instead of the author, as Search Engine Land reported ^[4]. In plain terms: you write the list, you name your competitors to make it look balanced, and the AI recommends your competitors.

Why the self-ranked list fails

That study looked at software companies, not local trades, so the number will not transfer neatly. The mechanism will. And Google's own guidance on review content is blunt about what a ranked list needs to be trusted: first-hand evidence for why something is the best, not a claim ^[5]. A trainer ranking themselves first has no way to provide that evidence about the people they ranked below.

The Second Trap: Paying to Get On

Then there is the other email. You have probably had a version of it: "Congratulations, your business has been shortlisted for Best in County 2026." The badge is free. The certificate, the feature article and the "premium listing" are not.

Some of these are legitimate small publications with a paid tier. Plenty are not much more than a mailing list and an invoice. Either way, two things are worth knowing before you hand over a card number.

What the law already says

First, Irish consumer law already has something to say here. Section 55 of the Consumer Protection Act 2007 lists practices a trader must not engage in, including displaying a quality or trust mark without the necessary authorisation, and using paid editorial content to promote a product without making clear it is a paid promotion ^[6]. Buying a placement is not automatically unlawful. But a "voted best in the county" badge on your homepage, when nobody voted, is the kind of claim worth running past your solicitor or the CCPC's guidance before you display it.

Second, the AI does not care about your badge. It cares about whether the page that mentions you reads as an independent, credible source. A paid listing on a site that exists to sell listings is unlikely to be the page that tips the answer.

Read the email before you bin it

I will own a mistake here. For years I told owners to bin every one of these "best of" emails without reading them, because most were junk. That was too blunt. A few of them were from genuine local publications doing honest roundups, and I talked at least one client out of replying to an editor who simply wanted photos and a quote. Read the email. Check who is behind it. Then decide.

Getting Onto the Lists That Count, in Five Steps

This is the part you can act on this week. None of it needs technical skill, and none of it involves paying anyone.

1. Audit the answers. Search the phrases your customers would use ("best dog trainer near me", "puppy classes [your town]") in Google, in ChatGPT and in whichever other AI assistant you have on your phone, and write down every list or article each answer cites.
2. Verify your own facts. Open your website on your phone and confirm that your services, the area you cover, your opening hours and how to book are all written in plain text on the page, not hidden in an image or a downloadable file.
3. Contact the honest lists. For each genuine roundup you found, from local news sites to community guides and trade associations, send a short, polite note offering a photo, a quote and a one-line description of what you do differently.
4. Spread your reviews. Ask happy customers to leave a review where AI tools can actually read it, not only on Google, and never offer anything in return for a review.
5. Re-run the audit every quarter. Answers shift, lists get updated, new roundups appear; a quarterly check takes half an hour and tells you whether any of the above worked.

Step four deserves a word of explanation. BrightLocal's survey makes the point that AI assistants such as ChatGPT cannot see inside Google's review ecosystem, so a reputation that lives only on Google is close to invisible to people asking those tools ^[3]. That is a claim from a US study and the platforms keep changing their data deals, so I would not bet the house on it. But spreading reviews across two or three places costs you nothing.

Your Own Website Is the Tiebreaker

Notice what step two is doing. It is not chasing anyone. The job is making sure that when an AI, or a person, lands on your site to check a detail, the detail is there.

That matters more than the lists. In the BrightLocal source study, business websites were the single biggest source category, and for straightforward "service plus location" searches they dominated ^[1]. And nearly nine in ten consumers who use AI for recommendations say they fact-check what it tells them ^[3]. Where do they go to check? Your website. If it is slow on a phone, out of date, or vague about what you do and where, you lose the person the AI just handed you.

What a website that wins the tiebreak looks like

Forget brand names for a moment. A site that holds up under this kind of scrutiny has a few non-negotiable qualities:

• Plain facts, in text. Services, area, hours, prices where you can, and a clear way to book, readable by a person and a machine.
• Fast on a phone. The fact-checker is standing in a queue or sitting in the car. A slow page is a closed door.
• Easy for you to change. If your hours change in November, the site should say so the same day, without a phone call to anyone.
• Your own address on the web. A proper domain that you control, not a page on someone else's platform.

That is the standard. Web60 was built to meet it for owners who do not want to become web developers. You describe your business and the AI builder turns that description into a full WordPress site in under a minute, which you can then edit yourself like any other WordPress site. It runs on optimised Irish infrastructure for speed, you keep full access to edit anything yourself, and the whole thing is €60 a year with hosting, SSL, backups and security included. No agency, no €75-an-hour change requests every time your Saturday class moves to Sunday.

If you want the bigger picture of how AI is reshaping the way small business sites are built and found, our guide to AI-powered WordPress for business owners is a good place to start. And if your worry is less about being left out and more about AI stating the wrong opening hours or prices, read what to do when AI gets your business details wrong.

Where this is not worth your afternoon

Let me be straight with you, because it would be easy to oversell this. If your diary is full from word of mouth, you are not trying to grow, and every new customer arrives through a referral anyway, the audit above is a nice-to-have. Run it once, fix anything glaring on your own site, and get back to work.

And a few limits you should know about before you start. You cannot edit somebody else's list. Some editors will never reply. AI answers vary from one run to the next, so the same question asked twice can return different names, and being cited by Google's AI is not the same as being recommended by ChatGPT. You are improving your odds, not flipping a switch.

A Closing Word

None of this is a reason to panic, and it is certainly not a reason to pay someone who promises to "rank you in ChatGPT". The businesses that get named consistently tend to be the ones that are easy to verify: clear websites, reviews in more than one place, and a mention or two on lists written by people with nothing to gain.

You already have the reputation. The work now is making sure the machines and the lists can see it, and that your own website backs it up the moment someone comes to check.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

There is no form to fill in and nobody can guarantee it. ChatGPT builds local answers from pages it can read, mostly business websites, directories and articles that mention businesses. Make sure your own website states your services, area, hours and booking details in plain text, collect reviews on more than one platform, and ask genuine local roundups and community guides to consider you.

Should I write a best of list on my own website with my business at the top?

It is usually a poor bet. Research by Lily Ray, reported by Search Engine Land, found Google's AI Overviews often cited self-promotional lists but recommended a competitor named in the list instead. Google's guidance also expects ranked lists to show first-hand evidence for each pick, which is hard to do credibly when you rank yourself against rivals.

Are paid best of awards and badges worth it?

Some come from genuine publications, many are simply sales emails. Check who runs the site and whether its lists read as independent. Under Section 55 of the Consumer Protection Act 2007, paid editorial promotion must be clear and trust marks need proper authorisation, so check with your solicitor or the CCPC's guidance before you display any badge that implies an independent vote or endorsement.

Why does Google's AI show a list instead of my website?

For "best" style searches, Google's AI Overviews often summarise articles that compare several businesses, because those pages answer the question directly. Your own website still matters, because it is where people go to check the details before they book, and it is a source AI tools draw on for simpler searches like a service plus a location.

How often should I check what AI says about my business?

Once a quarter is a sensible rhythm for most local businesses. Search the phrases your customers use in Google and at least one AI assistant, note the lists and sites cited, and compare against your last check. Do it more often in the run-up to your busy season.

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