Your Next Client Is Asking AI for a Salon. Will It Recommend You?

Something changed this year and most owners haven't clocked it yet. When someone new wants a salon or a barber, a lot of them have stopped typing into Google and started asking an AI — “where's a good nail place near Koreatown?” — and just taking the answer it gives.

The numbers back it up. AI's share of local searches went from a rounding error last year to nearly half this year, and Google's own AI summaries now appear on roughly four in ten “near me”-type searches. The catch: most local service businesses don't show up in those AI answers at all. By some counts, nearly 80% are invisible to them.

Why this is different from regular Google

Old Google gave you a list — ten blue links, a map, and you picked. The AI gives one answer. It names two or three businesses and moves on. If you're not in the two or three, you don't exist for that person. There's no page two to scroll to.

So the game stopped being “rank on the list” and became “be the name the AI says.” The marketers have an ugly acronym for it — AEO, answer engine optimization — but the idea is simple: make it easy for AI to understand and trust your business.

The thing that feeds all of them: your Google Business Profile

Here's the good news, and it's genuinely good. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews all lean on the same source — your Google Business Profile. When ChatGPT recommends a local spot, it's usually pulling straight from Google's profile data. Gemini treats it as the truth. Google's AI builds its answer around it. Fix one thing and you improve your odds across all of them.

That's why the boring weekly profile routine I've written about before isn't just “good for Google” anymore — it's how you get into the AI's mouth.

What to actually do

• Claim and fully complete your Google Business Profile — every field, real hours, real services with prices. The AI can only repeat what it can read.
• Keep your name, address, and phone identical everywhere — your site, Instagram, every directory. When the details conflict, the AI gets nervous and names someone else.
• Get reviews, and reply to them. AI engines lean toward businesses that look active and well-regarded.
• Put your answers in plain text on your website — what you do, where, for whom. AI can't read your beautiful photos; it reads words.
• Ask the AI yourself. Open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask “best nail salon in [your neighbourhood].” Whoever it names is your real competition now.

The honest part

I'm not going to tell you there's a trick that puts you first by Friday. There isn't. This is the same unglamorous work that's always made local businesses findable — accurate info, real reviews, plain content — just pointed at a new judge. The shops that show up in the AI answers a year from now are the ones doing it now, while most of their competition still doesn't realize the rules changed.

If keeping all of that current sounds like one more thing you don't have time for, that's exactly the kind of quiet weekly upkeep I automate. Either way, go ask the AI about your own neighbourhood today. It's a five-minute gut-check that tells you where you really stand.