AI Search Visibility: AI Counts Signals, Not Credentials

Last month I ran an AI search visibility check on my own business. I asked Perplexity, an AI search engine, to recommend an alarm company in our area, and it didn’t recommend mine.

A-Bell Alarms has served the Temecula Valley since 1985, and we have clients who have been with us since before Google reviews existed. The company that came up instead of us installs security cameras, and he and I refer work to each other. In California, installing burglar alarms takes an alarm company operator license, while installing cameras doesn’t, so he isn’t doing anything wrong. Perplexity just couldn’t tell the two apart. He had more reviews. That was the difference.

AI doesn’t check licenses. It counts signals. Reviews are one of them, and right now they’re the loudest.

BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found 45 percent of consumers used AI to find a local business last year, up from 6 percent the year before. Among people aged 30 to 44, it’s 64 percent.

Google spent July investigating reviews vanishing from Business Profiles, with some owners losing nearly all of theirs. And the rules for getting them are tighter than most of us knew. The FTC’s Consumer Review Rule doesn’t ban incentives. It bans tying one to a positive review. Asking for a review is fine. Asking someone to say how much they loved it in exchange for a free dessert isn’t.

That frustration is real, and most of us are living it honestly.

We follow the rules and our clients are still slow to leave one. That’s the honest position most of us are in.

Reviews are one of four signals AI checks. The others are clear content, local signals, and structured data. Most of us aren’t working on any of them.

Ask an AI tool what your customer would ask. Read what comes back.

Then bring what you find to my workshop, Is AI Recommending Your Business, on September 29.

For more Information: https://www.kathysizemore.com/ai-workshop