The Fundamentals That Carry A Page Into Google Still Carry It Into AI Answers. Most Local Businesses Are Skipping Them.

A pattern has taken hold across the local services market. Business owners hear that AI search is the next frontier, go to ChatGPT, and ask it to generate a blog that will get them SEO results. What comes back gets published without editing, strategy, or any connection to what the business actually knows. Some sites are now carrying 20 self-published press releases or AI-generated posts that say nothing a competitor's site doesn't already say. The content exists, but it doesn't earn citations in the discovery layer that AI answers pull from, because there's nothing in it worth citing.

Jon Almas, Founder of AM Creative, has been building growth systems for local businesses since 2016, primarily serving high-end home builders, plumbers, electricians, and chiropractors. His agency handles SEO, paid media, and full-funnel lead tracking for businesses generating $200K or more in annual revenue. His approach is practitioner-level and outcome-focused: the only metric that matters is whether the phone rings.

"A search engine is a search engine," Almas says. "It's going to be fed information from somewhere. The fundamentals that get us into one are similar and have crossover that get us into AI." His argument is that the rush to treat AI optimization as a separate discipline has distracted local businesses from the structural work that actually drives inclusion in both traditional and AI-powered results.

Clean structure over content volume

Almas breaks the signals that drive AI inclusion into four categories: content, UI, technical fundamentals, and authority. Of those, content is where local businesses get it wrong most consistently, not because they aren't producing it, but because what they're producing has no strategic architecture behind it.

"The most common scenario we see is businesses with a bunch of random stuff on their website, either from other agencies who were doing things a little differently," Almas says. His response is to strip the site back to its foundation and rebuild. The structure he deploys follows a repeatable pattern: dedicated service pages, location pages, and homeowner questions framed as H2 headers. "We basically tear it all down and build it clean, structurally sound for search."

The approach reflects a broader principle that clean technical foundations precede any optimization work. A site cluttered with generic content and inconsistent structure doesn't just underperform in traditional search. It sends weak signals to the language models assembling AI answers, because there's no clear entity, no structured expertise, and no reason for the model to select that source over a competitor with better-organized information.

Local expertise as the durable signal

The competitive advantage Almas sees for local businesses is one that AI-generated content structurally cannot replicate: firsthand knowledge of the work. LLMs tend to lean toward established national brands when assembling answers, and local businesses trying to compete against that default need something more specific than generic topical coverage.

"Local expertise and authenticity is hard to fake," Almas says. "Give your input on a specific question that homeowners have that they ask AI a lot, and give your business take on it based on your experience." A plumber who explains why a particular pipe fitting fails in Florida humidity is producing content that a language model can cite with confidence. A plumber whose site contains ten ChatGPT-generated posts about "the importance of regular plumbing maintenance" is producing content the model has already seen a thousand times.

Almas is also watching for a regulatory correction. He's flagged that a spam update targeting AI search manipulation is likely on the way, and that gains built on seeded citations and templated location pages could reverse when it arrives. His advice is to avoid strategies built on quick wins that exploit current gaps in how AI models surface local results. "Making sure you have a holistic strategy that isn't built on these quick wins, which often might work initially, but then there's an update and they actually hurt you," Almas says.

The buy-in challenge with clients is real, particularly with business owners who've spent time researching AI tactics on their own and arrive with preconceived ideas about what needs fixing. Almas's response is simple and earned through consistent results across his portfolio: "Trust me. That's why you're hiring me. Give me six months and go from there." The confidence comes from running a system that tracks leads from the top of the funnel through to the sales call, keeping the focus on the only outcome local service businesses actually care about. If the phone rings, the strategy is working. If it doesn't, nothing else matters.