The way people find service providers is changing. Increasingly, a potential customer will not type a search query into Google and scroll through results, they will ask an AI assistant like ChatGPT directly: “Can you recommend a reliable electrician in Cape Town?” or “Who is a good digital marketing agency for a small business?”

What most business owners do not yet realise, is that those AI recommendations are informed by publicly available signals, and your Google review profile is one of the most significant. ChatGPT leans heavily into your Google review status in considering whether to recommend you or not.

AI language models and AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT draw on indexed information to form assessments of businesses. Google reviews are prominent, publicly available and structured in a way that makes them easy to index and evaluate. When an AI weighs up which service provider to surface, it is paying attention to:

A business with twelve reviews and zero responses looks very different to an AI to one with forty reviews and thoughtful, professional replies to each one. The former signals a company that does not engage. The latter signals one that values its clients and takes its reputation seriously.

Many businesses treat Google reviews as something that just happens to them, without a dedicated strategy to growing their base of Google reviews. For such businesses, a review comes in, it sits there, and life moves on. Your response, or lack thereof, is part of your public record. It is visible to every prospective client who searches for you, and it is visible to the AI tools they increasingly rely on.

Failing to respond to a positive review is a missed opportunity. Failing to respond to a critical one is a liability, and having a pattern of non-engagement across your review profile tells a story you probably do not intend to tell.

You do not need a formula or a lengthy response for every review. What matters is that you engage genuinely. For positive reviews, acknowledge the client by name where possible, reference something specific from their experience, and thank them sincerely. For negative reviews, stay calm, acknowledge their concern, and take the conversation offline where appropriate.

This kind of engagement does three things at once:

If your business has fewer than twenty Google reviews, making a concerted effort to earn more should be a priority. Ask satisfied clients directly, ideally immediately after a positive interaction. Make it easy for them to review you by sending them a direct link to your Google review page.  The link to your review platform can be copied from your Google profile and inserted into an email, WhatsApp message or onto your invoices to be sent directly from your accounting system to clients.

Then make responding a weekly habit. Set a reminder to spend ten minutes each week checking and replying. The compounding effect of a well-managed review presence is significant, and the cost of neglecting it is becoming higher as AI-driven discovery continues to grow.