Google Business Profile has a "Searches" section in its Performance report that rarely gets opened. It shows the exact terms people typed to find your listing, going back roughly six months, and you can export it. Compare that list against the keywords your website already targets, and you'll usually find two lists that don't match: phrases your site is built around that never show up in what people search for you, and phrases people search that your GBP description doesn't mention at all. Closing that second gap is a real, specific piece of local AEO work, and it's worth doing.

Why this matters more now than it used to

Citation signals - the consistency and completeness of your business data across the web - have been losing importance in local search for a decade. Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report, a survey of 47 named local search experts scoring 187 ranking factors, says that trend has reversed for AI search specifically. Its top five factors for AI search visibility, in order: being listed on expert-curated "best of" lists, having a dedicated page for each service, prominence on key industry-relevant domains, the quality of unstructured citations (press coverage, blog posts, government and association sites), and the authority of the third-party sites your reviews sit on. Four of those five are about how the business gets mentioned elsewhere, not what it says about itself on its own profile. As the report's author, Darren Shaw, puts it: "In AI SEO, mentions (citations) are the new link."

One factor in the same table lands directly on this workflow: "Consistency of Citations on Primary Search Engines (Google Maps, Bing Maps, Apple Maps)" ranks 31st out of 187 for AI search visibility specifically. That's the exact thing step four asks you to do - keep your GBP description and your citation listings saying the same thing.

Keyword-specific GBP factors show up in the same survey without the same fanfare. On the AI search scoring, "Keywords in GBP Description" ranks 115th, "Presence of Place Topics Matching Keywords" ranks 123rd, and "Keywords in GBP Service Descriptions" ranks 139th, out of 187. Real, measured factors, just not the leading ones, and nowhere near as important as showing up the same way across other sites.

The tactic reaches Google's own AI products more directly than it reaches ChatGPT

The mechanics behind AI citation differ by platform, and this is where advice built around a single platform's results needs correcting. Shaw's own survey notes the distinction directly: scoring a factor like GBP categories, he'd give it a zero for ChatGPT but a higher score for Google's AI Mode and Gemini, "because Google would have access to this data while other LLMs would not." Google's AI products read Google Business Profile data directly. ChatGPT doesn't have that access.

ChatGPT reaches local business information mainly through Bing instead. A Seer Interactive study found 87% of ChatGPT's citations matching Bing's own top results. Editing your GBP description has a direct path into Google's AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini answers. It has no equivalent direct path into ChatGPT, which is reading a different index altogether.

The workflow

Four steps, and none of them need anything beyond what's already in your GBP dashboard for a single location:

1. Open your GBP Performance report and export the Searches section. It covers roughly six months, and Google hides any term with fewer than 15 impressions.

2. List the keywords your homepage, location pages, and service pages are built around.

3. Compare the two lists. The phrases in your search export that your GBP and citation descriptions don't mention are the gap worth closing.

4. Add those phrases into your GBP description and matching citation listings, written as a real sentence a customer would read, not a keyword string.

That last point matters. Whitespark's 2026 report added "Keyword Stuffing the GBP Description" as a new factor this year, and it already ranks 41st for negative impact out of 42 negative factors surveyed, and 29th for suspension risk. Adding three or four missing phrases, written naturally, is the job. Cramming in every term on the list isn't.

A few common follow-up questions

Does this work for businesses with multiple locations?

The workflow is the same, but exporting search data one location at a time doesn't scale past a handful of locations. At that point, use the GBP API or a bulk-export tool built for it.

Will this move my ChatGPT visibility?

Possibly, eventually, if ChatGPT's own index picks up the change through Bing. But the direct path this tactic opens runs through Google's own AI products, not ChatGPT. Set the expectation there first.

How often is this worth redoing?

Roughly every six months lines up with how far back the GBP search data goes. Doing it more often mostly re-surfaces the same gaps.