A customer who would once have typed "solar installer Lagos" into Google now sometimes types "who should I hire to install solar in Lagos" into ChatGPT instead. They get a short answer naming two or three companies. If you are not one of them, you were not beaten in a ranking. You were never in the conversation.
This is worth treating as its own problem rather than as a branch of search optimisation, because the mechanics are different and so are the fixes.
Start by finding out where you stand
Before changing anything, ask. Open ChatGPT in a fresh conversation and ask two questions, in this order.
First, "Who can I hire for [what you do] in [your city]?" Use the city name, never "near me", because near me resolves against wherever the person asking happens to be and you will never be able to repeat the test. Write down every company it names.
Second, in a new conversation, "What is [your exact business name]?" Write down the answer word for word.
Those two answers are your starting position, and the gap between them is the most useful thing you will learn. Being described accurately and never recommended is an entirely different problem from not being known at all, and they need different work.
Do the same on Perplexity, and on Google, where the AI summary at the top of the results is doing the same job. Three assistants, two questions, about ten minutes.
Why assistants leave businesses out
An assistant answering "who should I hire in Lagos" is not consulting a directory of Lagos businesses. It is drawing on what it has read across the web, and on what it can retrieve at the moment you ask. So the question is not whether it likes you. It is whether there is anything for it to find, and whether what it finds is clear enough to repeat with confidence.
Most Nigerian businesses fail that test for unglamorous reasons.
They are described differently in every place they appear. One name on the website, another on Instagram, a third on a directory listing somebody else created years ago. A machine reading all three has no way to know they are the same company, so it treats each as weak, unconfirmed information and leaves all of them out.
They never say plainly what they do. A homepage headed with a slogan, followed by three paragraphs about passion and excellence, contains no retrievable fact. There is nothing in it an assistant could quote.
They exist only inside platforms that assistants cannot read well. A business whose entire presence is an Instagram account is close to invisible to a system that mostly reads the open web.
And they are not mentioned anywhere except by themselves. A company that appears on one website, its own, is a claim. A company that appears on its own site and is also named in a handful of other places is a fact.
What actually moves it
Say the same thing everywhere. Pick one description of your business, one company name, one address format, one phone number. Use it identically on your website, every social profile, every directory. This sounds trivial and it is the single highest value hour in this whole piece, because consistency is what lets a machine collapse five scattered mentions into one confident entity.
Put the facts where a machine can read them. Structured data is a block of code on your page that states plainly what your business is called, what it does, where it is, and how to reach it. Human visitors never see it. It exists so that nothing has to be inferred from your prose. Most website builders can add it, and a developer can do it in an hour.
Give each service its own page. An assistant asked who does a specific thing in a specific city is looking for a page about that thing. A single page listing eight services is a worse answer to every one of those eight questions than eight pages would be.
Write the answers to the questions people actually ask. Not keyword pages. Actual answers, long enough to be useful, specific enough to be worth quoting. A paragraph that answers a real question cleanly is the unit an assistant lifts.
Get named somewhere other than your own website. Industry directories, partner sites, local business listings, press. It does not have to be prestigious. It has to be somewhere else.
Let the assistants read you. A file called robots.txt sits on your domain and tells automated readers what they may look at. Many sites block AI crawlers by default, sometimes because a developer copied a template. If being recommended matters to you, blocking the systems doing the recommending is an odd way to go about it.
What does not work
There is a growing market in Nigeria for packages that promise to get you recommended by AI. Be careful with anything that guarantees it, because nobody controls what these systems say and anybody claiming otherwise is either confused or selling.
Stuffing your pages with the word AI does nothing. Writing content for machines rather than people does nothing, and the systems are specifically built to notice it. And there is no advertising slot inside an assistant’s answer that you can buy in Nigeria today, so anyone offering to place you in one is offering something that does not exist.
The Nigerian situation specifically
Ask an assistant for a supplier in Lagos and the answers are often thin, sometimes wrong, and frequently list international companies or the two or three Nigerian names large enough to have been written about extensively.
That is a gap rather than a wall. There is far less competition for a machine’s attention here than there is for a human’s. A well described, consistently presented, properly marked up Nigerian business has an unusually good chance of becoming the name that gets returned, simply because so few of its competitors have done any of it.
That window will not stay open. It is open now.
How to know whether it worked
Ask the same two questions, worded identically, on the same three assistants, once a month. Record the answers. Note which competitors get named instead of you, and whether any website is cited in the answer.
That record is the measurement. There is no dashboard for this, no position number, and anybody showing you one has invented it. The evidence is the answers themselves, kept over time.
If you would rather not run it yourself, the AI checks are part of our free deep digital audit. We ask fixed questions on fixed assistants under fixed conditions, record exactly what came back, and tell you which competitors were named instead of you.
