Short answer
Reviews are now a data feed for machines, not a vanity badge. Volume, recency, sentiment and your replies all get read, and the platform you collect them on decides which assistant sees them: Yelp feeds ChatGPT, Google Business Profile feeds Google's AI surfaces.
Section 01
Which platform feeds which assistant?
Reviews used to be social proof for humans. They are now training material and live evidence for machines. And crucially, which platform you collect them on decides which assistant sees them.
| Collect here | Feeds | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | AI Overviews, Gemini, AI Mode | The dominant local pipeline. Review text and owner responses both inform the answers. |
| Yelp | ChatGPT, Perplexity | Licensed data. ChatGPT can't see your Google reviews directly, so this is one of the few doors in. |
| Tripadvisor | Perplexity | Formal partnership. Hospitality, travel and experiences — if that's you, this is not optional. |
| Trustpilot, G2, Capterra | General crawl + B2B answers | G2 sits in the top ten most-cited sources overall. If you sell software or services, go and get reviewed. |
Section 02
The ask that actually works
"Would you mind leaving a quick review? If it helps, the useful bits are what you needed doing, roughly where you are, and how it went. Two sentences is plenty — it genuinely helps other people find us."
That produces reviews containing service, location and outcome. Which is exactly what gets matched to "emergency boiler repair in Wandsworth on a Sunday". You didn't game anything — you just stopped throwing away information.
Reply to every review, especially the grumpy ones, in normal human sentences. A calm, specific reply to a one-star is one of the strongest trust signals you can manufacture legally. And never, ever buy reviews. Fake patterns are detectable, and an entity flagged as dodgy is far harder to rescue than one that's merely quiet.
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Your score across the major engines, whether you're blocking the crawlers, and the three things costing you the most — on screen before you've finished your coffee. If it comes back healthy I'll tell you to spend your money elsewhere.
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This chapter is part of Get Seen by the Robots, also available as a free PDF: Download the PDF version.
