Does my Google Business Profile affect whether AI recommends me?

What does Gemini's grounding actually mean for my profile?

It means Google Search sits between Gemini and the answer, and your Business Profile is one of the things Google Search knows about you.

The chain is documented at every link, which is rare in this field:

1. Your Business Profile supplies name, category, address or service area, hours, phone and services. Google's own guidance for it is to reflect your business accurately.
2. That information appears on Google Search and Google Maps.
3. Gemini answers with Google Search grounding. Our own scanner queries it that way, through the Generative Language API, and we publish that on The Receipts Engine.

What is not documented anywhere is how much weight any of that carries in a given answer, and nobody outside Google can tell you. What you can say confidently is that the pathway exists and that the facts travelling down it are yours to get right.

Sources: Google Business Profile Help. Answerable, The Receipts Engine.

Why is the ChatGPT link weaker?

Because ChatGPT does not query Google.

ChatGPT's search answers are built from pages fetched by OpenAI's own crawler. OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot as the one that is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features, separate from GPTBot, which gathers training data, and ChatGPT-User, which fetches a page because a person asked for it. Your Google profile is not in that pipeline directly.

It gets there indirectly, and that is the part worth acting on. Directories, aggregators and roundup articles routinely take their hours, addresses, categories and phone numbers from Google Business Profile data. Those pages are exactly what ChatGPT's crawler returns. So a wrong fact in your profile propagates outward into the sources ChatGPT does read, and fixing the profile is upstream work rather than Google-specific work.

Source: OpenAI crawler documentation.

Which five profile fields most often carry a wrong fact?

Category, hours, address or service area, phone number, and the business name itself.

1. Primary category. Too broad and you are not a candidate for the specific question a buyer asked. Wrong and you become a candidate for questions you cannot service. This is the single field most worth arguing about internally.
2. Opening hours, including public holidays. Any answer of the form open now is only as good as this field, and special hours are the part everyone forgets.
3. Address and service area. A service-area business carrying a street address it does not trade from is the classic contradiction, and contradictions are what make a system decline to state anything about you.
4. Phone number. One number, one format, everywhere it appears.
5. Business name. Your real trading name, not a keyword-stuffed variant. Google's guidance is that the name should reflect the real-world business, and a stuffed name also guarantees your name will not match cleanly across other sources.

The aim is not more information. It is no contradictions. Machines resolve scattered mentions into a single entity by matching facts across sources, and two versions of your address gives a system a reason to stay quiet about you rather than risk being wrong.

What did Answerable's study not measure here?

Google Business Profile fields, entirely.

Our scan of 300 Australian businesses recorded per-engine visibility, an overall score, site readiness and four on-site checks: crawlers allowed, JSON-LD present, meta basics, llms.txt. Profile completeness, review counts and ratings are not in the dataset, and the dataset is published in full so you can confirm the columns yourself.

So we are not going to give you an effect size, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does without publishing their sample. The honest position is a plausible mechanism we did not measure, and we would rather say that than quote a percentage we cannot defend. It is the same reason we publish our own score of 29 out of 100 on is AI visibility worth it.

What we can say from the data we do have: across the 137 businesses with complete records from both engines, on-site readiness correlated with per-engine visibility at only r = 0.116. Whatever is deciding who gets named, it is mostly happening away from your own website. A profile that third parties copy from is one of the few off-site surfaces you control outright.

Source: Answerable, The State of AI Visibility in Australia 2026. 300 Australian businesses, six industries, scanned 30 July 2026. Raw data published as CSV and JSON under CC BY 4.0.

What does a ten minute profile check look like?

Read your profile as a stranger, then compare every fact in it against your other listings.

1. Open your profile in a logged-out browser window. You are looking at what a customer sees, not what the dashboard tells you.
2. Check the primary category against the exact words customers use on the phone. If they say emergency plumber and your category says plumbing supply store, that is the finding.
3. Check regular hours, then set special hours for the next round of public holidays.
4. Read the address exactly as written, then compare it character by character against your website footer and your top three directory listings. Fix mismatches at the source, not just here.
5. Check the phone number format is identical everywhere.
6. Add the services or products you actually want to be asked about, in the customer's words.
7. Then ask Gemini a buyer question in your category and read what it says about you. Wrong facts in the answer usually trace straight back to a listing you have not fixed yet.

See what Gemini actually says about you.

A free scan asks Gemini and ChatGPT real buyer questions in your category and shows you the answers in full, including the facts they got wrong about you.