AEO for local business: how do local services get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity?

Local AEO depends on the same trust signals as local SEO — consistent NAP, Google Business Profile completeness, and review velocity — plus three AI-specific layers. Surfaced audits across ~500 local-business sites show that brands ranking in the top 3 of Google's local pack are cited by ChatGPT Search 4–6x more often than brands outside the pack.

The local AEO stack: (1) Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, and Yelp. ChatGPT Search and Copilot both lean on Bing Places; Perplexity pulls from Google Business via Bing. (2) Implement LocalBusiness schema with address, geo, openingHours, telephone, priceRange, and aggregateRating. (3) Earn 50+ Google reviews and 20+ Yelp reviews — review count is a citation re-ranker signal, not just a SERP signal. (4) Build city-page content — a dedicated page per service-area city, each with FAQPage schema answering the three queries locals actually ask ("how much does X cost in [city]," "best [service] near me," "is [brand] open Sunday"). (5) Maintain consistent NAP across BrightLocal's top 50 citation sources — Yelp, YellowPages, Foursquare, BBB, Apple Maps, etc.

Two underrated tactics: (1) Local subreddit presence — r/[YourCity] is over-indexed in ChatGPT "best in [city]" retrieval. (2) Local press in city business journals and "Best of [City]" lists — these are the highest-trust local retrieval sources, especially for legal, medical, and home-services categories.