What an AI can read about your cafe is what Google already reads, so start there

When someone asks their phone for a good cafe near here, why would it say yours? I can’t tell you exactly, and neither can anyone selling you an answer.

What I can tell you is what Google says its AI answers read, what three AI assistants said when I asked one cafe question myself, and five fixes you can make this week, most of them from your phone.

What did the AI assistants say when I asked about cafes?

They named cafes, and they named different ones. On 2 October 2026 I asked ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google which cafe to go to in Katoomba, logged out, with a fresh chat or search each time.1

ChatGPT named five cafes and linked a travel magazine and a review site. Perplexity named three and linked one cafe’s own website, the same travel magazine and the same review site. Google showed no AI summary for that search, so I asked Google’s AI Mode, which named six and drew on the travel magazine and Google’s own business listings.

Only one cafe was named by all three. None of them said why it chose those cafes, beyond star ratings or a source link.

That is one question, asked once, from one computer, on one day. It does not tell you whether the answers change tomorrow, what a signed-in customer sees, or whether being named brings anyone through the door. I’m not naming the cafes here, because this isn’t a ranking and I didn’t judge them.

What does Google say its AI answers need?

Google says they need nothing special. Its page for website owners, last updated 10 December 2025, says “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode”, and no special tuning either.2

AI Overviews are the AI summaries that sit at the top of some Google searches, and AI Mode is Google’s chat-style search. The same page lists the basics that still count, including “Making sure that important content is available in textual form” and checking that your “Business Profile information is up-to-date”.2

Your Business Profile is Google’s free business listing, the one that puts you on Google Maps. So keeping the listing you may have set up years ago up to date is on Google’s own list for its AI answers.

Five fixes to make this week

Each one is free, and you can check each one on your phone.

Fix one: make your Google listing match the cafe today

Sign in at business.google.com and read your listing as a stranger would. Check your hours first, including public holidays, then your phone number, your address and your category.

Then search your cafe’s name in a private window on your phone (in Chrome, tap the three dots, then New Incognito tab). If what you see is not what you’d tell a customer at the counter, change it in your listing.

Fix two: put your menu on your Google listing

Google has a menu editor for food and drink businesses. Its help page says “Restaurants can list their menu items on their Business Profile on Google”, with sections such as mains and desserts, and descriptions and prices for each item.3

1. Go to your Business Profile.
2. Select Edit menu.
3. Add a section, then add each item with its description and price, and select Save.

Google says changes can take 24 to 48 hours to show on Maps and Search.3 Change it when your menu changes, or it will be wrong in a new place.

Fix three: put your menu on your website as words, not only a photo

Google’s list of basics asks for “important content” in “textual form”.2 For a cafe, the menu and the hours are the important content. So put them on your website as words, not only in a photo or a PDF (a document file you download).

How to tell. Open your website on your phone and press and hold on a dish name. If you can select the words, they are text; if your phone offers to save an image instead, the menu is a picture. Type the menu out as words on the page, and keep the photo as well if you like it.

Fix four: check your website lets the AI assistants in

Your website may have a small file called robots.txt, which tells the computer programs that read websites for search engines (called robots or crawlers) which pages they may read. Google’s list starts with “Ensuring that crawling is allowed in robots.txt”.2

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, says “Any public website can appear in ChatGPT search”, and tells website owners “make sure you aren’t blocking OAI-SearchBot”, the name of its search robot.4 To check, type your web address followed by /robots.txt into your phone’s browser.

If you see “Disallow: /” under “User-agent: *” or under “User-agent: OAI-SearchBot”, your site is shutting robots out. Ask whoever built your website to open it up. If there is no file at all, nothing is being blocked by it.

Fix five: answer your reviews, and check the other sites

Reply to every review, the good and the bad, in a sentence or two. Google’s own tips page says “Reply to reviews: Show customers that their feedback matters”.5

If you ask customers for reviews, ask every customer the same way. Google’s rules do not allow a business to “Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers”, or to offer anything in exchange for a review.6

Then search your cafe on the travel and review sites the AI assistants linked in my test. If what they say about you is out of date, correct it where the site lets you.

Why can nobody promise you’ll be named?

Because the companies don’t publish how their AI assistants choose. OpenAI’s page for website owners covers how not to block its robot and how to see visits from ChatGPT, and says nothing about how a business gets recommended.4

Google’s page says the ordinary basics count, and stops there.2 So anyone who promises your cafe will be the one named is promising something Google and OpenAI don’t publish.

What can be done is to ask the AI assistants the same questions every month and write down what they say. That shows you who they name and which sites they draw on, and it shows you when it changes.

If you’d rather hand it over

Get Found is the part of our menu that does this work: your Google listing set up properly, your details right on every site, and every review answered. One card on it, Ask the AI about you, is the monthly check: we ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot about you and the cafes around you, and you see what they say.

Start with one thing, or a bundle. If yours is different, we scope it.

Book a free hour. We’ll ask the AI assistants about cafes in your suburb on the call, and look at what they say about yours.