An assistant does not know you are standing in Pavia.
Google shows you Pavia because it knows where the phone is. An assistant answers from what it has read.
Proximity was the advantage and it does not carry over
Somebody searching on a phone here is shown this town, because the search knew where the phone was. That was structural, and it belonged to you rather than to anybody who wanted to sell it to you.
An assistant has no map panel and no radius. It answers out of what it has read, and what has been written about Milan is thicker than what has been written about Pavia by a wide margin.
So the answer drifts thirty-five kilometres north
Ask for a trade in Pavia and you can get Milan names, or a mix of both, because a machine reaches for the businesses it is able to describe. The leak gets a second route.
Nobody sends you a report about that either. You find out because a customer mentions they went north, if they mention anything.
The only thing that puts Pavia back in is the word Pavia
Written in sentences, on pages, beside the thing you actually sell. Not in a page title on its own and not inside a picture. A reader that never sees your layout still reads your text.
In practice that is one page per thing you sell, each naming the town and the thing in the same paragraph. Unglamorous, and cheap.
The autumn intake asks a machine because it has nobody to ask
Part of the customer base here arrives in October knowing no one. There is no neighbour to ask and no shop already trusted, so the question gets typed, and more of it now gets typed into an assistant.
To that audience you exist only if something readable says so.
What we will not claim
There is no position to buy inside an answer and no queue to join. What we will do is ask an assistant for your trade in this town while you watch, and tell you which pages its answer was built from.
Questions worth asking
Does an assistant know where I am?
Not reliably, and frequently not at all. It answers from what it has read, so a town has to be written down before it can be in the answer.
Why would it name Milan businesses?
Because more has been written about them. Volume of readable text is doing the job that distance used to do.
Is this worth it for a market this size?
It costs little precisely because almost nobody local is doing it. Being one of three named in a small town is cheaper than being one of ten in a large one.
Do I need a new website for this?
Usually not. Most of it is text on the site you already have, plus details that agree wherever a machine finds them.
How do I check it before paying anybody?
Open an assistant, ask for your trade in this town the way a customer would, and read the names. If yours is absent you have learned something for nothing.
Send us your site and the ten words a customer would type. We will tell you whether a machine can answer with your name in them. Get a free audit.
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