How does AI decide which area you cover?
No AI tool holds a map of your patch. It works out roughly which town the customer is in, then reads whatever the web already says about who works there. We fetched 36 UK plumbing and heating websites to see what that reading would find.
There is no service area setting inside an AI. The engine works out the customer's rough location, city and region, then runs an ordinary search for that place and reads what the web already says. Your patch is set by your website, your Google Business Profile and other people's pages. On 36 UK plumbing and heating sites we fetched on 23 August 2026, two stated their area in a form a machine reads without guessing.
Is there a setting somewhere for the towns I cover?
No. There is no field inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Google's AI answers where you type the towns you serve, and there is no form to fill in.
Google says as much in its own guidance for site owners: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary", and "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features."1
Mostly that is good news. It also means the decision is out of your hands in one specific way. An AI works out your patch by reading what already exists about you, so if nothing on the web connects your business to Knaresborough, nothing you do inside an AI will connect you to Knaresborough either.
The rest of this article is about who writes that record, and what it currently says.
What does the AI know about where the customer is?
Less than most people assume, and it is deliberately approximate. When OpenAI's models run a web search, the location attached to that search is four fields: a two-letter country code, a free-text city, a free-text region and a timezone. OpenAI's own developer documentation labels the type of that block "approximate".2
Perplexity's search works the same way. Its location setting takes a country, a region, a city, or latitude and longitude, and the coordinates cannot be sent on their own: they have to arrive with a country.3
So when a customer in Knaresborough asks for a plumber near them, what reaches the search step is a town and a region, not an address. The engine is not weighing you against the firm three streets away. It is looking for businesses the web associates with a place, and then working out which of those it can say something confident about.
What happens between the question and the answer?
An ordinary web search, and usually more than one. Google is explicit that its AI answers run on the same machinery as the rest of Search: to be used, a page has to be in Google's index and allowed to show a couple of lines of its text in ordinary results.1 ChatGPT's search step sends a rewritten question plus that approximate location out to a search provider.2
They ask
A customer types a question into an app, usually without naming a town.
It guesses the place
The tool attaches a rough location: country, city, region, timezone.
It searches
The question is rewritten as ordinary searches for that place and sent to a search engine.
It reads and names
Whatever comes back gets read, and the businesses that place clearly connects to get named.
None of that is exotic. The uncomfortable part is that every step runs on material you did not write for a machine: your homepage, your Google listing, a directory entry from 2019, a Facebook page a relative set up.
It is also not a fringe habit any more. Ofcom reports 1.8 billion UK visits to ChatGPT in the first eight months of 2025, against 368 million in the same period of 2024, and says about 30% of searches now show an AI summary, with 53% of adults saying they see those summaries often.4
of consumers said they had used an AI tool to find a local business, up from 6% a year earlier. That survey covered 1,002 US adults, not UK ones, and there is no published UK equivalent for service businesses.5
How does Google decide which local businesses to show?
Google names three things, and they are worth reading in plain words. How well you match what was asked, how far you are from the person searching, and how well known you are.6 Google also states there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.6
The middle one is where owners tend to go wrong. Distance is measured from the customer, not from the edge of the area you say you cover. And when the customer has not shared their location, Google says it "uses what it knows about their location", which lands you back at a town-sized guess.6
| What Google looks at | What that means | What you can change |
|---|---|---|
| How well you match | Whether your listing and your pages answer the thing that was actually asked | A lot. The words you use for your trade and your towns are yours to write |
| How close you are | The gap between the customer and your business, measured from them | Almost nothing, short of moving |
| How well known you are | How much the rest of the web has to say about you | Slowly. Reviews, mentions and links accumulate, and cannot be bought from Google |
Where does Google think you work?
Wherever your Google Business Profile says, inside limits that surprise most people. You have to give named places rather than a radius: Google's rule is that you "can't set your service area as a radius distance around your business" and must use a city, postcode or another type of area.7
Two more limits sit alongside it. The whole area should not stretch more than about two hours' driving from where the business is based, and you can list at most 20 service areas.7
That is a genuine constraint on a one-van business that has quietly told itself it covers "the North West". Twenty named places is a decision rather than a gesture, and making it is more useful than it sounds, because those names are exactly what a machine can match against a question.
Google also publishes where profile information comes from: what the owner enters, what members of the public contribute, licensed data bought from other companies, Google's own interactions with the place, and crawled web content such as the business's own website.8 Your site is one of the inputs to your listing, not a separate thing running alongside it.
What we found on 36 UK plumbing and heating websites
Almost every site tells a person where it works. Almost none of them tells a machine.
On 23 August 2026 we fetched the homepage of 36 independent plumbing and heating businesses across ten UK towns: Solihull, Harrogate, Truro, Norwich, Stirling, Swansea, Bolton, Guildford, Lincoln and Inverness. All 36 answered. We looked at the visible words, and at the hidden code many sites carry that spells out facts such as an address or opening hours in a form machines read without guessing.
This is one trade on one day, chosen from ordinary search results. It is not a random sample and not a survey, and we are not presenting it as one.9
The gap between the first number and the third is the whole point of this article. A person reading "covering Harrogate, Ripon and Knaresborough" understands it instantly. A machine has to infer it from prose that also contains a boiler brand, a phone number and the word "Yorkshire" in the footer.
Two other counts are worth having. Twelve of the 36 linked to a page listing the places they serve, which is the single cheapest thing on this list to fix. One described its patch as a mileage radius, which is the one description Google's own service area rules will not accept.7
The two exceptions are instructive, so here they are without names. One Stirling firm listed its city and its wider region as two separate named places, which is as close to a clean answer as we found. One Inverness firm stated a single town in its hidden code while the visible words on the same page said it covered the Highlands and named towns well beyond Inverness. Its machine-readable claim was narrower than its true one.
Should you add the hidden "areas served" field?
Yes, and it is not a lever. The shared vocabulary most sites use for that hidden code has a field meant for exactly this, called areaServed. It is genuinely useful, and it is also not what Google asks for.
Google's own page describing what it wants for a local business asks for two required items, a name and an address, then recommends about ten more: rating, telephone, opening hours, price range, geographic coordinates and so on. An areas-served field appears on neither list.10 Google separately says structured data is not required for its AI features and there is no special markup to add for them.1
So treat it the way you would treat writing your opening hours clearly on the door. It costs nothing, it removes an ambiguity, and anything that bothers to look can read it without guessing. It will not put you in Yorkshire.
What a person reads
- "Covering Harrogate and surrounding areas"
- A phone number with an 01423 dialling code
- Photos of a job in a village nobody names
- "30 years serving Yorkshire families"
What a machine can read without guessing
- The named towns and villages, written out in full
- A full postal address, including the postcode
- A page titled with the places you actually travel to
- The county or region alongside the town
Why do businesses get missed in their own town?
Usually because the written record is thinner or vaguer than the owner believes it is. Four patterns come up again and again in the audits we run at Frontpage AI.
"And surrounding areas." The phrase does no work at all. Something matching a question about Knaresborough against your page finds Harrogate, and then a shrug.
Place names that belong to more than one place. There is a Swansea in Massachusetts, a Boston in Lincolnshire and another in Massachusetts, a Perth in Scotland and another in Australia. While assembling the sample for this article, a search for plumbers in Swansea returned a page of results from Swansea, Massachusetts. Naming your county or region alongside your town removes that ambiguity for free.
A patch that exists only in your head. If the towns you drive to have never been written down anywhere, on your site, on your listing, in a review, then no amount of reading will surface them. Google lists crawled web content and licensed third-party data among the sources for a business listing, and neither can invent a place name you never published.8
A listing that quietly disagrees with the site. An old address, a service area set once in 2021, a trading name that does not match the sign on the van. When two records conflict, something has to pick one, and it will not always pick yours.
What to do this week
None of this needs a budget. Four of the five things below take an afternoon, and you do not need anyone's help with them.
- Write the names down. Put the towns and villages you actually travel to into the visible words of a page, ideally one called something like "Areas we cover". Twelve of the 36 sites we looked at had one, so this alone puts you ahead of two thirds of your trade.
- Pick your twenty. In your Google Business Profile, set your service areas as named places rather than leaving them vague, up to Google's limit of 20 and inside about two hours' driving of your base.7 You edit this yourself, or whoever manages the listing does.
- Say the county as well as the town. "Bolton, Greater Manchester" is unambiguous in a way that "Bolton" is not.
- Make the listing and the site agree. Same trading name, same address, same phone number, same towns, in both places.
- Add the hidden areas-served field. This is the one you delegate: whoever built or maintains your site adds it, and it is a few lines of code rather than a project. Then check what AI actually says about your business and see whether the towns come back right.
Frontpage AI is a UK studio that builds and manages websites for independent service businesses, structured so that Google and AI answer engines can read, trust and name them. We work only with UK service businesses such as trades, clinics, salons and instructors, and charge from £88 per month on a 30-day rolling plan with no setup fee. If you would rather see the reasoning before the sales pitch, our page on Generative Engine Optimisation sets out what we actually do.
- There is no service area setting inside an AI tool. Google states there are no additional requirements and no special markup needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
- The location an AI works with is approximate: a country code, a city, a region and a timezone, per OpenAI's own developer documentation.
- Google names three things behind local results: how well you match what was asked, how far you are from the customer, and how well known you are. It says there is no way to pay for a better local ranking.
- A Google Business Profile service area must be named places rather than a mileage radius, should stay within about two hours' driving of your base, and is capped at 20 areas.
- Of 36 UK plumbing and heating homepages Frontpage AI fetched on 23 August 2026, 34 named their own town in the visible words but only 2 stated the area they cover in a form a machine reads without guessing.
Common questions
Can I tell ChatGPT which areas I cover?
Not directly. There is no field inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Google's AI answers where a business types the towns it serves. Google states that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and no special markup to add. The only way to change the answer is to change what the web says about you: your own pages, your Google Business Profile, and other people's listings.
How many towns should I list on my Google Business Profile?
As many as you genuinely travel to, up to Google's limit of 20. Google requires named places such as a city or postcode rather than a mileage radius, and says the whole area should not stretch more than about two hours' driving from where the business is based.
Does adding the hidden areas served field make me appear in more towns?
No. Google's own list of what it wants in a local business's hidden code asks for a name and an address, and recommends about ten more items such as telephone, opening hours and rating. An areas served field is not on either list, and Google says structured data is not required for its AI features. Adding it removes an ambiguity for anything that does read it. It is not a switch that puts you in a new town.
Why does an AI recommend a business further away than mine?
Because the location it works with is a town and a region rather than a street, so it is not comparing you with a competitor three streets away. Google names three things behind local results: how well you match what was asked, how far you are from the customer, and how well known you are. A better known business in the same town usually beats a closer but quieter one.
Is a separate page for every town I cover a good idea?
There is no published UK evidence either way for service businesses, so treat any confident answer as an opinion. What is measurable is that a place you have never named anywhere cannot be matched to a question about that place. One honest page listing the towns and villages you actually travel to does that job, and 12 of the 36 UK plumbing and heating sites we checked on 23 August 2026 had one.
Sources
Every figure above was checked against the original publication rather than a summary of it. Where a study is not UK based, we have said so in the text.
- AI features and your website. Google Search Central, checked 23 August 2026. Google's own statement of what a site needs to do to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- Web search tool, user location. OpenAI developer documentation, checked 23 August 2026. OpenAI's own description of the approximate location attached to a web search: country, city, region and timezone.
- User location filter. Perplexity API documentation, checked 23 August 2026. The fields Perplexity accepts for personalising search by place.
- From apps to AI search: how the UK goes online in 2025. Ofcom, drawing on its Online Nation 2025 report, published 10 December 2025. UK measurement.
- Half of consumers are asking AI for business recommendations. BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 10 March 2026. Survey of 1,002 US adult consumers, of whom 455 had used AI to find a local business. US only.
- Tips to improve your local ranking on Google. Google Business Profile Help, checked 23 August 2026. Google's own explanation of relevance, distance and prominence.
- Manage your service areas for service-area and hybrid businesses. Google Business Profile Help, checked 23 August 2026. The named-places rule, the two-hour driving guidance and the 20-area limit.
- Understand how Google sources and uses info in Business Profiles and local search results. Google Business Profile Help, checked 23 August 2026. Google's own list of where listing information comes from.
- Coverage test of 36 UK plumbing and heating websites. Frontpage AI, first-party, 23 August 2026. Homepages of 36 independent plumbing and heating businesses across ten UK towns, requested as an ordinary browser from our own network, then checked for place names in the visible words and for machine-readable business details. One trade on one day, selected from ordinary search results. Not a random sample.
- Local business structured data. Google Search Central, checked 23 August 2026. Google's required and recommended fields for a local business, neither of which includes an areas-served field.
Published 23 August 2026. Last checked against sources on 23 August 2026. Platform documentation changes without notice, so we recheck this page rather than assume it holds.