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Get Found · local search, reviews + AI answers

Get found on Google, Maps and ChatGPT.

Somebody nearby needs what you sell today. They will ring one of the first three results and never know you existed. This page is about being one of those three.

Book a free chat Start with what is actually broken
A shop owner unlocking her glass front door at first light, roller shutter half raised
4.8 · 87 reviews every one answered
Top 3 on the map for the searches that matter
AI-generated scene. She depicts nobody, and the numbers show what the package builds.

Not showing up is four different problems. Find yours.

Each one has a different fix, and you can check every one from your own phone in about ten minutes. Tap the one that sounds like you.

  • why is my business not showing up on google
  • my business is verified but not showing on google maps
  • how to rank top 3 on google maps
  • how to get more google reviews for my business
  • how to get my business to show up in ai searches
There is no listing, or nobody has claimed it

Google shows local businesses from a free listing called a Business Profile. If nobody has claimed yours, Google has nothing to show, and 84% of the people who would have found you were searching for what you sell, not your name.3

Check it in a minute

Search your business name plus your suburb. No panel with your details, or a “Claim this business” link, means this is you.

Verified, but still not in the top three

Verification makes you eligible, not visible. Google ranks on how well your listing matches the words typed, how close you are, and how known you are, partly through reviews. In Google’s own words: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.”1

Check it in a minute

Search what you sell plus your suburb in a private window, away from your own premises. From your own counter you are at zero distance from yourself.

Found for your name, not for what you sell

Two different searches. Your name finds you regardless. “Plumber Springwood” is decided by whether your listing itemises what you do and where, and most listings have one category filled in and nothing else. The second search is where new customers come from.

Check it in a minute

Search what you sell plus your suburb, then your name. If only the second finds you, this is you, and it is the most common one.

You used to show up, and now you do not

Almost always a data problem, and Google publishes the causes: a post office box gets you suspended, a duplicate listing causes trouble on its own, and a profile nobody logs into can have access revoked.2 Advertising does not repair any of them.

Check it in a minute

Search your business name alone. Two versions of yourself, “permanently closed”, or nothing: that is your answer.

Why buying ads fixes none of these

Ads put you above the map results for as long as you keep paying, and change nothing underneath. Reasonable to buy on purpose, with a cap, once the free listing is right; an expensive way to hide a problem before that. If somebody’s answer to “I am not showing up” is a monthly ad budget, ask them which of the four they think you have.

If you go to customers, not them to you

Trades and mobile services get a different setup. Google allows one service-area profile where a business “travels to customers at their physical locations”, says you “should hide your business address from customers”, and caps the service area at about two hours’ driving from base.2 A home address left visible, or an area drawn across half the state, both cause problems that look like bad luck.

Sources + notes
  1. Google, Tips to improve your local ranking on Google, support.google.com/business/answer/7091, fetched and read 29 August 2026. The page shows no last-updated date, so that is an accessed date rather than a published one. Worth knowing: the sentence everybody quotes, “relevance, distance, and prominence”, is not what the page says any more. It now reads “mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity” while the section heading underneath still says Prominence. We have used Google’s plain-English definitions rather than pick one of its two live nouns.
  2. Google, Overview of Google Business Profile policies (answer/13762416) and Guidelines for representing your business on Google (answer/3038177), both fetched and read 29 August 2026. Neither page publishes a last-updated date.

Three forces decide the top three. Two are yours to change.

Google names them itself: how well you match the words typed, how close you are, and how known you are.1 Distance is fixed. The other two are the four weeks of work.

Match Says what you do, and where Distance How close you are to them Reputation Reviews: recent + answered Google decides The map, top three 1 Gets rung first ★★★★☆ 4.6 (87) 2 Gets rung next ★★★★☆ 4.4 (52) 3 Last one seen ★★★★☆ 4.7 (31) 7 You, today Where nobody scrolls the work
The three forces are Google’s own, from its local-ranking page. Two of them are yours to change, which is exactly what the four weeks are for.
The thing everybody is competing for

Three results get the calls.

Search anything local on a phone: a small map, three businesses, and the blue links a long way down. That map holds exactly three spots, and they get the calls.

Getting in is not a trick. It is a complete, maintained listing with recent, answered reviews. That is genuinely most of it, which is why it is four weeks at a fixed price, not a monthly mystery.

84%

of visits to a local business profile came from somebody searching for a type of business, not for that business by name.3

67

customer actions a month on the median Australian business profile: 36 website clicks and 18 calls. The highest of the four countries measured, and old enough now to be directional only.4

Sources + notes
  1. BrightLocal, Google My Business Insights Study, 15 July 2019. 45,264 listings across four countries. The 84% is a four-country figure, not an Australian one.
  2. Same study, Australian cut, 3,857 Australian listings. Genuinely Australian and genuinely 2019. Google Business Profile has changed materially since, so this is directional and we would not build a forecast on it.
Change two · when somebody asks instead of searching

How to show up when somebody asks ChatGPT.

More people now ask an AI assistant instead of searching, and if the answer does not name you, you were never in the running. Most of what is sold to fix that does not survive the evidence. Here is what does.

12%

of Australians now use AI tools as their main way of finding information, up from 5% a year earlier.5

50%

would rely on the AI summary without clicking through to anybody.5

1 in 5

AI answers for an Australian user linked to an Australian source.6

0.39%

of Australian web traffic is AI chatbots. Search is 90.72%. Both are true.7

“There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.”

Google’s own documentation, 10 December 2025.8

“You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features.”

Same page. That sentence rules out most of what is sold as AI-search preparation.8

What we will not sell you. It is a short list, on purpose.

Four things get pitched constantly as AI-search preparation. None of them survives being read, so none of them is on the scope sheet.

  • A Wikidata entry. Self-created items are discouraged and deleted.
  • A Wikipedia article. The notability bar is out of reach, and a bought one gets noticed.
  • Page speed as an AI lever. The three studies claiming it do not survive being read.
  • Posting on Reddit as your own customer. Against the rules, and fatal for a trust business.
The full evidence, if you want it

There is exactly one piece of causal evidence in this entire field. It ran 252,000 trials with the brand names stripped out, so it measured the content rather than the reputation attached to it. Four things drove whether a page got quoted in an AI answer: whether it was genuinely about the thing being asked, whether it stated explicit prices, whether it carried recent dates, and where it sat in the list the model was reading. Edits that changed only the formatting did nothing at all.9

That is why this website publishes its prices, dates every figure, and names the source underneath. Not as a flourish: it is the only tactic in the field with a controlled result behind it, and it happens to be the same thing that makes a page useful to a human being. It is also why we do not sell anything called Answer Engine Optimisation. A critical academic survey covering November 2023 to July 2026 put it plainly: “Commercial claims about GEO, however, have advanced faster than the evidence.”10 And in Australia the term has no measurable search demand anyway: local SEO outsearches the whole answer-engine family by roughly 25 to one.

The last thing worth knowing is what the AI companies themselves publish, because we went and looked on 29 August 2026. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity all publish documentation on their web crawlers, and all of it is written from one direction: how to stop them. The single piece of positive advice in the lot is OpenAI’s, and it amounts to make sure you are not blocking the crawler called OAI-SearchBot. Not one of the three publishes any guidance on how a business gets recommended, preferred or ranked in an answer.11 So we check the crawler is not blocked, which takes ten minutes, and we are honest that nobody can sell you the rest.

One split cuts against most of the advice you will read: AI summaries turned up on only 15% of searches with local intent, and on 92% of informational ones.12 For “plumber near me” the AI layer barely matters yet, and anybody selling you an urgent AI-search package for that search is selling urgency. For “how much does it cost to replace a hot water system” it is already most of the page, and you win it by having something on your website genuinely worth quoting.

  1. Telsyte Australian Artificial Intelligence Study 2026. Online survey, April to May 2026, 2,023 Australians aged 16 and over.
  2. University of Sydney, 27 January 2026. Analysis of 434 AI-generated news summaries produced by Microsoft Copilot for an Australian user. In three of seven prompts no Australian source appeared at all. Over half pointed overseas.
  3. Statcounter, Australia, May 2026. Chatbot share of Australian web traffic against search.
  4. Google, AI features and your website, developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features, last updated 10 December 2025. This is the only Google page cited on this site that publishes its own date; the Business Profile help pages publish none. The same page adds that “optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO”, and lists keeping your Business Profile up to date among its recommended practices. It stops short of saying Business Profile data feeds AI answers, and so do we.
  5. Controlled study, 252,000 trials, arXiv:2605.25517. Brand names were anonymised, so the four drivers are properties of the content rather than effects of reputation.
  6. Olivier Martinez, critical survey of generative engine optimisation covering November 2023 to July 2026, arXiv:2607.14035v1, 15 July 2026. The same survey rejects the widely-repeated “GEO increases visibility by 40%” claim as a relative maximum on one metric under one configuration, and warns that gains decline as adoption rises.
  7. OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers and the Publishers and Developers FAQ; Anthropic, Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, last updated 7 April 2026; Perplexity, Perplexity Crawlers. All fetched and read 29 August 2026. OpenAI is the only one of the three offering any visibility advice, and it is “make sure you aren’t blocking OAI-SearchBot” plus how to track the referrals. Anthropic’s page is written entirely as an opt-out guide. Perplexity has one inclusion sentence, also about not blocking the crawler.
  8. Whitespark, 540 queries, May 2025. AI Overviews appeared on 15% of local-intent queries, 92% of informational queries and 97% of hybrid ones.

One number you will see quoted everywhere is missing on purpose. “Reddit is 40% of AI citations” is a misreading of a metric its own publisher defines as the percentage of prompts where a source was cited, which is answer frequency rather than citation share. Measured as citation share across 680 million citations, Reddit is 1.8% on ChatGPT. Treat every domain-share statistic in this field the same way.

What Get Found actually is.

Four weeks, five pieces of work, all in accounts you own and keep. Tap any line for the detail.

Your Google listing, rebuilt Every service itemised, hours set, real photos, questions answered.

The single thing that decides whether you appear at all. Built inside your own account, under your password. The questions section gets answered before somebody else answers it for you.

Reviews, asked for and answered Every customer asked, every review answered inside a day.

A routine that asks every customer with a one-tap link, and replies written in your own voice. We set it up, then train whoever runs your front desk until they can run it without us.

The pages that do the explaining Rewritten so a search for what you sell lands on you.

Specific, priced and dated, because that is what the only controlled study in this field says gets quoted.9

Listings that agree with each other Apple, Bing and your trade directories, made identical.

Both build listings from data you may never have seen. Making your name, address and phone number identical everywhere is dull, and it is also the reason half of these problems exist.

The baseline, written down first Every number recorded on day one, measured again at 90 days.

Profile views, calls, direction taps, review count and average, and where you rank for the searches we agree on. Recorded before anything changes, so the result is a comparison and not an opinion.

Reviews do the most work. And carry the most rules.

Two different jobs get called “reviews”: getting more, and dealing with one you hate. One of the two answers will disappoint you.

Getting more of them

A customer The day after the job

“On time, sorted it, tidied up after. Would ring again.”

Your reply, inside a day

“Thanks for taking the minute. See you next time.”

No trick, only a routine: ask every customer, at the moment the job ends, with a one-tap link.

76% of Australians surveyed would rather four stars from 15 reviews than five stars from five. 258 people, 2020.14 Volume beats perfection.

The numbers, and their limits

31% of consumers say they will only use a business rated 4.5 or better, up from 17%, and 47% will not use one with fewer than 20 reviews.13 That survey is American, and we are not going to pretend it is Australian. The 76% above is the one Australian figure, and it is small and old: printed anyway, with its sample size, because the finding is counter-intuitive and there is nothing better.

The one you want taken down

A name you don’t recognise Unfair, and staying up

“One star. Not happy.”

Your public reply, read by every future customer

“No booking under this name in our records. If this was your job, ring us direct and we will sort it today.”

Almost nobody can. Google removes rule-breakers, not unfair reviews.15 What works is the public reply.

How reporting actually works

In Google’s own words: “Google doesn’t get involved in conflict between businesses and customers.”15 You can report any review, but only policy breakers come down: abuse, spam, a conflict of interest, something about a different business. You get one appeal, and evaluation “typically takes several days”. Google documents no route by which a genuine, policy-compliant negative review is removed, so treat “guaranteed review removal” exactly like guaranteed first place on Google.

Four ways well-meaning businesses get into trouble
✕Asking only your happy customers

The industry calls it review gating, and Google bans it in as many words: merchants may not “discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers”.16 The ACCC treats selectively suppressing feedback as conduct capable of misleading consumers.

✕Rewarding a review

Google prohibits incentives outright, including anything offered to change or remove a bad one. The ACCC’s position: any incentive must be offered for every review whatever it says, and disclosed.

✕Asking customers to name your staff

Written down, and it surprises people: Google names “content that identifies a staff member” as prohibited requested content.16 A customer naming your technician unprompted is fine. Asking them to is not.

✕Editing or hiding bad reviews

In 2020 the Federal Court ordered HealthEngine to pay AU$2.9 million after it admitted not publishing around 17,000 negative reviews and editing around 3,000 more before publishing them.17

The routine we build asks everybody, every time, no filter. It is the only lawful version, and the version that produces reviews that read as real, because they are.

Sources + notes
  1. BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 1,002 respondents. United States. No Australian equivalent of this survey exists, and we looked.
  2. Capterra Australia, 28 January 2020, 258 respondents. Australian, and weak: a small sample, six years old, published by a review site with an interest in the answer. Printed anyway, with its sample size, because the finding is counter-intuitive and useful and there is nothing better.
  3. Google, Report inappropriate reviews on your Business Profile, support.google.com/business/answer/4596773, fetched and read 29 August 2026. No last-updated date is published on the page.
  4. Google, Prohibited & restricted content, support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114, fetched and read 29 August 2026. No last-updated date is published. The same page does confirm what is allowed: merchants may “solicit or encourage the posting of content that does represent a genuine experience, without offering incentives to do so or attempting to influence the rating or the contents of the review”.
  5. ACCC media release, 20 August 2020, HealthEngine to pay $2.9 million for misleading reviews and patient referrals. The conduct ran between 31 March 2015 and 1 March 2018 and was admitted.

The other places your business already exists. Whether you put it there or not.

Apple, Bing and the directories build listings from data you have never seen, and four platforms businesses still print on their websites have closed. Open your sector.

Every business, every sector 4 platforms
  • Google Business Profile start here
    Free, and it decides most of the outcome. If you only ever do one thing, do this one properly.
  • Facebook Recommendations start here
    Thumbs-up recommendations rather than star ratings. Weaker in search than Google, still read before they ring.
  • Apple Business worth it
    Apple Maps is where a large share of Australian phones send people.
    The detail, dated

    Note the name: Apple Business Connect was retired on 15 April 2026 and folded into Apple Business, and businessconnect.apple.com now redirects. Anyone still telling you to claim a Business Connect listing has not looked since March. Apple hosts no reviews of its own, so you manage the listing here and the reviews stay where they were left.

  • Bing Places for Business cheap, once
    Modest traffic, and about twenty minutes of work once your Google data is right.
    The detail, dated

    It moved from bingplaces.com to bing.com/forbusiness in October 2025, which is why half the guides online now point at a redirect.

Trades + home services 5 platforms, 1 closed
  • Word of Mouth worth it
    A reviews-first site rather than a lead marketplace.
    The detail, dated

    Live on 20 August 2026, citing more than 779,000 reviews.

  • hipages your call
    Pay per lead, reported industry-wide at AU$30 to AU$80 a lead.
    The detail, dated

    Negative feedback is not shown on public profiles the way positive feedback is, so treat it as a lead channel and not as a reputation one.

  • ServiceSeeking your call
    Subscription from a reported AU$49 a month, or roughly AU$9.95 a lead pay-as-you-go.
  • Houzz sector only
    Renovation, building and design. Pointless for anybody else.
  • Oneflare closed
    Retired into Airtasker.
    The detail, dated

    oneflare.com.au redirected to airtasker.com when we checked it on 20 August 2026.

Hospitality + food 6 platforms, 3 closed
  • Tripadvisor start here
    Claim it and reply to everything. Real volume for Australian venues, and the replies are read.
  • OpenTable worth it
    Only if you take bookings. Reviews tied to a real booking are harder to fake and better trusted.
  • Uber Eats + DoorDash worth it
    Only if you deliver. In-app ratings are worth as much as the listing itself.
  • Menulog closed
    Ceased Australian operations on 26 November 2025.
    The detail, dated

    Customers and restaurants were moved to Uber Eats.

  • TheFork closed
    Exited Australia on 31 March 2024.
    The detail, dated

    Previously Dimmi, which is the name most venues still have printed somewhere.

  • Zomato closed
    Wound down its Australian review and discovery product years ago.
    The detail, dated

    Formerly Urbanspoon here.

Health + allied health 3 platforms
  • HotDoc start here
    Booking and patient engagement, widely used in Australian general practice and allied health.
  • HealthEngine eyes open
    Usable, but read the review section above first.
    The detail, dated

    The Federal Court penalty in 2020 was about how this platform handled reviews, and knowing that should shape what you trust it with.

  • Whitecoat check first
    The listing site looks deliberately retired. We would confirm before trusting an old listing.
    The detail, dated

    whitecoat.com.au returned an HTTP 410 Gone on 20 August 2026, which usually means a page has been retired deliberately. The parent business appears to be operating as an app.

Retail, professional services + beauty 3 platforms
  • ProductReview.com.au start here
    The largest Australian consumer opinion site across retail and services. A free plan lets you read and reply.
  • Fresha sector only
    Beauty and salon. Reviews are tied to bookings.
    The detail, dated

    It moved from free to paid tiers during 2025, so price it before you commit.

  • RateMyAgent effectively mandatory
    Real estate only, and in that sector it is not optional.
    The detail, dated

    Reviews are verified against an actual property transaction.

Every status was checked against the live site on 20 August 2026 and is dated in our own research notes. Platforms close: four in these lists have, and each group says how many. We re-check before we build any part of your business on one.

This is who this is for.

Trades, shops, kitchens and practices, in the Mountains, across Penrith and the Hawkesbury, and out to Parramatta and Camden. The businesses whose next job is decided by a phone held at arm’s length on a footpath.

A tradesperson in hi-vis writing on a clipboard at the open tray of a ute on a suburban street
The single strongest sector for this work. “AI for tradies” returns a full family of Australian search terms; “AI consultant Penrith” returns nothing at all. A generated scene: he depicts nobody, same as every generated image here.
Two women working through something on a laptop at a shop counter, ring binders and a card reader beside them
The other half of the list: shops, practices and anybody whose counter is also their office. A generated scene, not a client and not a customer, because every photograph on this site is scene-setting and we say so rather than letting you assume otherwise.

How the four weeks run.

The same shape every time, so you always know what happens next and what is expected of you. The total demand on your time is about three hours.

  1. Week one

    The free chat, then a one-page scope

    If we cannot help, you hear it on the call; if we can, you read the scope before anything starts.

  2. Week two

    Listing rebuilt, baseline recorded

    Your Google Business Profile done properly in your own account, and every number written down first.

  3. Weeks three + four

    Pages, directories, training

    Key pages live, directories agreeing with each other, and your team shown the review routine until it sticks.

  4. Day 90

    The comparison

    The same numbers measured the same way, including anything that did not move.

What it costs

from AU$990

One off, not a retainer. No lock-in, no percentage of anything, and the final figure in writing before you commit to a dollar. Staying close afterwards is optional, from AU$149 a month, stop any time.

What the AU$990 covers

Spelt out, so the word “from” is not doing any hiding.

  • The visibility check, written up in plain English
  • Google Business Profile rebuilt in your own account
  • The review routine set up and your team trained on it
  • Three key pages rewritten
  • The baseline recorded, then measured again at 90 days

More pages, a full directory cleanup, or an ongoing content stream cost more, and they get priced before you commit rather than appearing on an invoice afterwards.

How you will know whether it worked.

Written down before we start, measured the same way at 90 days. This is the section most agencies leave out, and leaving it out is the whole trick.

Profile views and actions
How many saw you, rang you, or tapped for directions.
Where you rank
Your map position for the agreed searches, checked from your customers’ suburbs.
Reviews
Count, average, recency, and how many got a reply.
Enquiries
Calls and forms: the number that pays for the work.
What we will not promise
A ranking, a traffic figure, or a revenue number. Nobody honest can.
Before you talk to anybody

Check your own listing first.

Search what you do plus your suburb, tick what is already true. Tick most of them and you do not need us: we would rather you found that out here than after paying us to discover it.

Everything on this list lives on your own Google Business Profile, free, and you can look at all of it right now without talking to a single person.

Tick what is already true. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored.

Worth doing if
  • People search for what you do, near them
  • The phone should ring more than it does
  • Reviews are thin, stale or unanswered
  • You want to own it, not rent it
Probably not, if
  • You sell nationally on catalogue size
  • You want guaranteed first place. Nobody honest promises that
  • You are full, on referrals alone
  • You want it run forever on a retainer

The questions people ask before the first call.

If yours is not here, ask it on the call. We would rather answer it than have you guess at it.

Do I need a new website for this

Almost never. Most of what decides whether a local business gets found sits in the Google listing and a handful of pages you already have, not in a rebuild. If a rebuild genuinely is the right call we will say so, and it is a separate conversation with a separate price rather than something bolted onto this one.

How long before anything changes

Listing changes show within days. Reviews build over weeks, because they depend on how many customers you serve. Ranking for the searches actually worth winning takes longer than either, which is why we measure at 90 days rather than promise at 30.

Somebody left a review that is not true, and I want it gone

Understandable, and mostly not possible. Google removes reviews that break its content rules. It does not remove a review for being unfair or wrong. What it does do is show your reply underneath it forever, to everybody who comes afterwards, which is why the reply is the part worth spending time on. Anyone selling guaranteed review removal is selling the same thing as guaranteed first place on Google.

Will I have to keep paying to stay found

No. It runs in your own accounts and your own people are trained to keep it going. Staying close afterwards exists if you want it, from AU$149 a month, month to month, and you can stop it whenever you like. If we have done this properly you should be able to.

What if my trade is not really searched for locally

Then this is the wrong package and you will hear that on the first call, before any money changes hands. Some businesses win everything through referral and repeat custom, and pouring money into local search would be a waste for them. We would rather tell you that than take the fee.

Who actually does the work

We do, in your accounts, with you in the room for the parts that matter. Nothing is handed to a junior or sent offshore, and you keep every password and every profile from the first day to the last.

Can you get me showing up in ChatGPT

We can do the things the evidence actually supports, and we will tell you plainly what those are and where they stop. Nobody can guarantee a mention in an AI answer, because the people who build those systems do not publish a way in and change them constantly. Read the section above for exactly what we do, and for the four things we refuse to sell.

Find out which of the four you have.

Half an hour, about your business, not about AI. We will look at your listing while you are on the phone and tell you what we would do and what it would cost. If the answer is that you do not need us, that is what you will hear.

Book a free chat