Ask AI Who the Best SEO Consultant in Cairns Is and It Names a Directory

I have been tracking what Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT actually say when someone asks them to recommend a business in Cairns. Not what they say about SEO in general. What they say when a real person types a real question with a real town name in it.

The results were not what I expected, and the pattern is worth knowing about whatever industry you are in.

The city question and the region question behave completely differently

I ran the same style of question two ways.

Ask about Cairns and the AI mostly recommends directories. Semrush's agency listings. Localsearch. Topseos. Bark. Oneflare. These are aggregator sites, and several of them have no particular connection to Far North Queensland at all. They just have a page with the right town name on it.

Ask about Far North Queensland instead and the answer changes shape entirely. Now it names actual businesses, with actual websites, run by actual people. Same subject, same intent, same day. Different geography, different kind of answer.

That is not the AI being inconsistent. It is the AI doing exactly what it always does, which is reaching for the best available source. The difference is what happens to be available.

Why the town name pulls in directories

Directory sites build pages at scale around search volume. "SEO agency Cairns" has volume, so somebody has built a page for it. So has somebody else. There are dozens of these pages, all structurally similar, all stuffed with business names, all sitting there waiting to be the most convenient thing for a language model to summarise.

Nobody builds a directory page for "best SEO consultant in Far North Queensland". The phrase does not have enough volume to be worth templating. So when the question gets asked, there is no aggregator page to reach for, and the model has to go and find businesses that have actually written something about operating in that region.

The same thing happens at the other end of the scale. Nobody has built a directory page for "which Port Douglas tour operators handle wet season bookings" or "do I need SEO or Google Ads first for a Mareeba trade business". Those questions get answered from real content, because real content is all there is.

What this means if you run a business here

Three things, and they are more practical than they sound.

Your visibility in AI search is not one number. You might be invisible for the town-name search and doing well for the regional or specific one, and you would never know unless you checked both. Most people check the town name, see a wall of directories, and assume there is nothing to be done.

The directory listings matter more than you would like. I am not thrilled about this either. But if the models are leaning on Localsearch and Oneflare for the highest-volume local queries in your category, then being properly listed on those platforms is doing citation work for you whether you like the platforms or not. It is unglamorous and it takes an afternoon.

The specific questions are where you can actually win. Not "best plumber Cairns", which is a fight against aggregators. But the questions your customers actually ask before they call you, which no directory has ever bothered to answer, and which you could answer better than anyone because you deal with them every week. That is the ground where a single business with genuine local knowledge outranks a national listings site, because the listings site has nothing to say.

The uncomfortable bit

There is a version of this finding that sounds like good news, and it is not quite.

Being cited as a source is not the same as being recommended. On a couple of the questions I tracked, my own site was pulled in as a source for the answer while somebody else got named as the business to call. The model read my page, used what was on it, and then recommended a competitor.

That is a specific failure and it has a specific cause. If your site reads as an article about a topic rather than as a business that does the thing, you get quoted rather than hired. Fixing it is not a content-volume problem. It is about being unmistakably identifiable as a business with a location, a name, a service and a way to get in touch, rather than a useful page that happens to exist.

What I would actually do about it

Start by checking. Ask ChatGPT and Google the questions your customers would ask, both with your town name and with the wider region, and write down who gets named. It takes twenty minutes and most business owners have never done it once.

Then look at what came back. If it is all directories, your job is partly a listings job. If it is real businesses and you are not among them, your job is a content and local SEO job. Those are different problems with different fixes, and the fastest way to waste six months is to work on the wrong one.

The thing I would not do is panic about AI search as a category. The fundamentals underneath it have not changed much. What has changed is that the gap between a business that has written something genuinely useful about its own market and a business that has not is now visible in a single sentence, delivered to someone who was about to make a decision.