Somebody types "best physiotherapist near Indiranagar open on Sunday" into ChatGPT. It answers with two or three names, in prose, with no list of ten links underneath.
If you are not one of the names, you were not outranked. You were not present.
Why this is a different problem
Traditional local SEO optimises for a results page. AI assistants do not produce one. They produce an answer, assembled from whatever the model can retrieve and whatever it holds about entities.
Three consequences follow.
There is no page two. A results page gives a marginal business a marginal chance. An answer naming three businesses gives you nothing if you are fourth.
Structured facts matter more than pages. Models lean heavily on consistent, structured information about entities. Where your facts disagree across sources, you become the harder business to state confidently — and a model that is unsure tends to name someone else.
You cannot see it happening. There is no rank report by default. Most businesses have no idea whether they are named.
Checking it yourself
You can do a rough version manually in twenty minutes.
Write down ten prompts a real customer might use. Not keywords — questions. "Where can I get a same-day dental appointment in Koramangala?" is a prompt. "dentist koramangala" is a keyword.
Run each in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI results. Record whether you are named, in what position, and how you are described.
The description matters as much as the presence. If an assistant says you close at 6pm and you close at 9pm, that is an upstream data problem showing up downstream — and it is losing you evening customers who never contact you to check.
Repeat monthly. Answers drift.
What to fix when you are absent
Almost always, the cause is upstream.
Inconsistent core facts. Name, address, phone, hours and category disagreeing across your site, your profile and directories. This is the most common cause and the most fixable.
Thin structured data. No or incomplete LocalBusiness markup on your site.
Weak corroboration. Few reviews and little third-party mention give a model little to work with.
Genuinely missing information. If nothing anywhere says you open on Sunday, no model can say it.
What nobody can do
Nobody can guarantee an AI assistant will name you. There is no submission form, no ranking factor list, no paid placement in an organic answer. Any vendor promising placement in AI answers is describing something they do not control.
What can be done is straightforward: make your facts consistent, complete and corroborated, then measure whether the answers change. That is the whole discipline.