More people now ask an AI assistant “who’s a good personal trainer in Leslieville?” instead of scrolling through search results. The assistant answers with two or three names. If you’re not one of them, you don’t exist for that person.
So I built a report in AIHQ that asks those questions the way a client would and records who gets recommended. It also records the searches the AI ran behind each answer, which turned out to be the most useful part.
What I found
I ran 13 questions about personal training in Toronto. My gym came up in 5 of the answers. It was first for Leslieville, and first when people asked for movement-assessment specialists.
It didn’t come up at all for the big city-wide questions, like “best personal trainer in Toronto.” It also didn’t come up for seniors, in-home training, Queen West, mobility classes or Hyrox.
(One answer per question from one AI, so treat this as a direction, not a ranking. Positions moved between two runs on the same day.)
Why the winners win
Reviews, not websites. The city-wide answers came mostly from review sites and “best of” lists, not from trainers’ own pages. One in-home training company was cited in 6 of the 13 answers. The trainers who keep getting named publish 125 to 340 reviews. I publish 34.
One sharp angle. Every business that won a question owned one clear thing: in-home sessions, clients over 50, sessions covered by insurance. The AI can repeat a sharp angle. “Premium personal training” gives it nothing to repeat.
Pages that match the question. Competitors had between 100 and 2,300 pages. I had 69. The searches the AI ran were specific, like a neighbourhood plus a need. If no page matches that phrase, the AI has nothing of yours to quote.
What this means if you run a small business
- Ask the machines yourself. Type your customers’ real questions into ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Note who gets named and which sources get cited.
- Reviews are now infrastructure. They used to be social proof for people. Now they’re the raw material AI answers are built from.
- Pick your angle and say it plainly, on your site, your Google profile and in your reviews.
- Write the page for the question. One clear page per service and neighbourhood beats one beautiful homepage.
- Check that your details match everywhere: name, address, phone and hours, so the machine trusts it’s all the same business.
Your website still matters. But its first reader is often a machine now, and that reader skims for facts, counts reviews and moves on.
