AI search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers) recommend the businesses whose own website, Google Business Profile and a few outside profiles all say the same clear thing about what they do and where they do it. They don't rank you the way Google's blue links do. They look for a plain, consistent description they can quote and then check in more than one place. In Celina, most trades have no established answer yet, because the town is so new. So the first business to publish that description clearly tends to be the one that gets named.
That's the whole idea. The rest of this post is how to do it for your own business, and how to tell whether it worked. We're based in Celina and run a free AI visibility check that shows what the engines say about your trade today; this is the do-it-yourself version.
Why most Celina trades have no AI answer yet
Ask the engines for the best Italian restaurant in a big, established city and they have a decade of reviews, articles and directory pages to draw on. Ask the same thing here and they often have very little.
The town is, by percentage, the fastest-growing city in the United States. The Census Bureau estimates it added about a quarter more residents between July 2024 and June 2025, reaching roughly 64,000 people, up from under 17,000 at the 2020 census. Every new neighbourhood brings businesses with no history: HVAC and plumbing companies, landscapers, dentists, pediatricians, salons, gyms, restaurants around the downtown square and in the new centres along Preston Road. Most of them open with a Facebook page and a phone number.
We saw the effect directly in our own scan. When we asked the three engines how a business in this town gets recommended by AI search, two of the three named no business at all. That is unusual. For most questions they name somebody, even when the fit is poor. An empty answer is an open seat: the engines have no habit to break, so a business that publishes a clear page for its trade and its town can become the answer quickly, often well before it climbs the ordinary search results.
What each engine reads before it names you
The three engines don't weigh the same evidence, and the differences tell you where to spend your effort.
- ChatGPT leans on businesses' own pages. In our scans, nearly every source it cited was a company website, so the page you publish is its main input.
- Perplexity cites company pages too, but it also cites LinkedIn and business directories. If you're listed nowhere but your own site, it has less to confirm you with.
- Google's Gemini favoured sites with many pages: one for each town served and each service offered. The businesses it named most had that kind of depth.
Your Google Business Profile matters for all three, because it's the one record where the engines can check your address, hours and category against what your website claims. We went through the five sources AI engines trust in an earlier post. The short version: your website matters most, and everything else exists to confirm that it's telling the truth.
How a new salon gets recommended, step by step
Say you've opened a salon in one of the new centres. Here is the order we'd work in. The same steps apply to an HVAC company, a dentist or a restaurant; only the words change.
1. Publish one page that says what you do and where
Your website needs one page an engine can quote. The first paragraph says it plainly: "A hair salon in Celina, Texas, offering cuts, colour, balayage and blowouts, open Tuesday to Saturday." Then list every service with a sentence each, your hours, your street address and the neighbourhoods you serve. Add a short FAQ that answers what new residents actually ask: parking, walk-ins, how far ahead to book, which product lines you carry. Keep all of it as plain text on the page, not in an image or a PDF. If what you have today is a Facebook page and a phone number, a fast, plain website with this page on it is the whole first step.
2. Fill in the Google Business Profile fields that matter
Open your profile and make these match the page word for word: the business name (your real one, with no keywords added), the primary category ("Hair salon", not "Beauty"), secondary categories for anything else you do, the services list using the same names as your page, the description, hours including holidays, and the address. Add photos of the actual room and chairs rather than stock images. Then ask your first customers for reviews. A profile with no reviews gives the engines little reason to prefer it over the one next door.
3. Set up a LinkedIn company page
It sounds odd for a salon, but LinkedIn was the directory Perplexity cited most in our scans. Create a company page with the same name, the same one-paragraph description, the town, and a link to your website. Post something once a month so it doesn't look abandoned.
4. Claim one directory your customers already use
Pick one directory people actually open for your trade (for a salon, that's usually a review site or your booking platform's public listing) and complete it with the same name, address, phone, hours and description. One complete, matching listing does more than five half-finished ones, and a listing that disagrees with your site about hours or address works against you.
If you're brand new, our online setup checklist for a new business in Celina puts these tasks in the order of your first two weeks.
How to test it, and how long it takes
Testing is the step most owners skip, and it's the only way to know whether any of this worked.
Ask each engine the exact question a new resident would ask: "Which hair salon in Celina should I book?" Put the same question to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode on the same day, write down every business named and every website cited, and note whether you're one of them. Our ten-minute test walks through the steps and gives you a scorecard.
Then do it again next month, and the month after. Results vary from day to day. The same engine can name you on Monday and leave you out on Wednesday, so one good answer proves nothing and one bad one proves nothing either. The honest measure is the count: out of all the questions you asked across all the engines this month, how many times were you named, and is that number rising? Expect the first movement in weeks rather than days, because the engines have to re-read your pages. In our own scans, ChatGPT moved first, since it leans most on a business's own site; the others took longer.
Don't change the questions between rounds. If you reword them each time, you can't tell whether the engines changed or you did.
In a town this new, the first clear and consistent description of a business tends to be the one the engines repeat.
How Deca Digital helps
We're based in Celina, and we build the pieces above for local businesses: a fast website with a page the engines can quote, a Google Business Profile and outside profiles that match it, and the AI assistant or booking flow that catches the enquiries once people start finding you (see all services). Our AEO page explains the free AI visibility check: we ask the engines the questions your customers ask, count who gets named, and send you the result with the fixes in order. How we work here in town is on our local page.
To find out whether the engines name your business today, book a free discovery call and ask for the free check.