"Tell me a good place for fish in the south of Tenerife." That question, which three years ago went into Google, is now something plenty of people ask ChatGPT. And the difference is stark: Google hands you twenty options and you choose; ChatGPT gives you three names. Either you're in those three, or for that customer you don't exist.
Almost nobody is working on this yet. It's a window that will close.
How does AI decide who to recommend?
By agreement between sources. A model doesn't visit your restaurant and doesn't take your word for what you are: it cross-references what it finds about your business across many different places and recommends what there's consensus on.
Which leads to the idea that governs everything else:
It isn't about ranking well on one search engine. It's about existing consistently in many places at once.
If there's information about your business on your website, in directories, in the local press, in area guides and in forums — and it all says the same thing — the model names you with confidence. If you only exist on your own website, or if every source says something different, it skips you and names a competitor.
Why does my business do well on Google but AI never mentions me?
Because they're different things. Google has become very good at interpreting signals from an ecosystem it dominates; an AI builds its answer from whatever has been written about you out there, wherever it comes from.
One practical detail most people don't know: several AIs don't read the web through Google, but through other search engines, and Bing is the main one. So it's worth having your Bing listing claimed and accurate: it's free, it takes an afternoon, and almost no business on the island has done it. But it's one more item on the list, not the secret.
What does "being everywhere" actually mean?
This is the underlying work, and it comes in layers:
1. Directories and maps. Your Google listing, your Bing listing and the directories for your sector. Claimed and up to date, not abandoned since the day you created them.
2. Press and online magazines. A mention in a local outlet counts for more than ten paragraphs on your own website, because it's an independent source the model can cite. An article about your opening, your new menu or your refurbishment is exactly the kind of material that ends up in an AI answer.
3. Area guides and roundups. The "best restaurants in Costa Adeje" lists, the tourist guides, the local blogs. Models lean on them heavily because the work of selection has already been done.
4. Forums and real conversation. Where people ask and other people answer with actual names. It's the hardest source to force, which is exactly why it carries the most weight.
5. Your website, marked up for machines. LocalBusiness schema is the machine-readable data that confirms who you are, where you are and what you do. Without it, the model has to work it out for itself.
What breaks this most often?
Inconsistency. It's the most common failure and the easiest to fix.
Same name, same address, same phone number, same category everywhere. If one directory has your old phone number, another the address from before you moved, and your website a third version, the model won't take the risk: it names the competitor whose details line up across the board.
An afternoon spent making sure everything says the same thing is worth more than months of new content.
What kind of content gets cited by an AI?
Write to be extracted, not to decorate:
- A direct answer in the first paragraph, with no warm-up introduction.
- Specific figures, dates and facts. That's literally what the model extracts.
- Headings written as real questions, the way a customer would put them.
- Comparison tables. The most extractable format there is.
- Accessible content, with no paywall and no text trapped inside an image.
How do I know whether I show up?
Ask it. Draw up a list of 8–10 questions a customer would genuinely ask ("best fish restaurant in Los Gigantes", "marketing agency in the south of Tenerife") and put them to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude once a month. Note whether you appear and who appears in your place.
Twenty minutes a month. Right now it's the cheapest way to know whether you exist in the fastest-growing channel there is.
Why it's worth doing now
In two years this will be a standard service and you'll have to fight for it. Today, in most parts of Tenerife, it's enough to do a handful of things the competition doesn't even know exist.
We work on this as part of local SEO: getting your details consistent everywhere and getting people talking about you where AI is looking. If you like, let's go through it together.