The Six Listings, in Order

There are hundreds of places your business could be listed. Six of them do almost all of the work, and the rest mostly exist to sell you citation services. This page is the six, in the order to claim them, with what each one actually feeds.

That last part matters more than it used to. When a customer asks an AI assistant “who’s a good electrician near me,” the assistant doesn’t know your business — it knows what these listings say about your business. Claiming them isn’t a marketing campaign. It’s making sure the record is yours and right.

Before you start: write the fact block

Open a note and write down, once, exactly:

• Your business name, with the punctuation and suffix you’ll use everywhere
• Address (or service area, if you work from home — more on that below)
• One phone number
• Hours, including the asterisks (“closed first Monday of the month”)
• One sentence: what you do, for whom, where

You’ll paste this into all six listings unchanged. The consistency is the point — machines confirm you’re you by cross-checking these facts, and every mismatch costs you a little trust. Page 3.2 turns this into a proper fact sheet; for now the note is enough.

1. Google Business Profile

Where: google.com/business · Verification wait: instant to a few days, occasionally a postcard.

If you do only one thing from this entire chapter, do this. Your Google Business Profile feeds Google Search, Google Maps, and — because nearly every AI assistant leans on search results or Maps data somewhere in its pipeline — a large share of what AI says about you, too.

While you’re in there:

• Pick your primary category carefully. It’s the single strongest signal you control. Choose the specific one (“Emergency plumber”), not the broad one (“Plumber”), if it honestly fits.
• Add photos that are evidence, not decoration: the storefront, the van, the work. Stock photos are worse than none.
• If you work from your home, set a service area and hide the address. Don’t invent an office. Google suspends profiles for fake addresses, and reinstatement takes weeks.

2. Apple Business Connect

Where: businessconnect.apple.com · Verification wait: usually same-day.

Every iPhone ships with Apple Maps as the default, and Siri answers from it. That’s roughly half the phones in the country answering questions about your category from a database most owners have never looked at. The claim flow is shorter than Google’s. Paste the fact block, add two photos, done.

3. Bing Places

Where: bingplaces.com · Verification wait: minutes if you import.

Nobody’s customers say “let me Bing that.” Claim it anyway, for one reason: Microsoft’s index feeds Copilot and several other AI assistants. Bing Places lets you import your Google Business Profile — the whole job is fifteen minutes, and it’s the cheapest AI-visibility move on this page.

4. Yelp

Where: biz.yelp.com · Verification wait: a phone call, usually.

You don’t have to like Yelp. You don’t have to respond to Yelp messages or buy Yelp ads — politely decline the sales calls, which will come. But AI assistants cite Yelp constantly, especially for restaurants, trades, and services, and an unclaimed page with a wrong phone number is being read as fact whether you participate or not. Claim it, fix the facts, walk away.

5. Facebook

Where: facebook.com/pages · Verification wait: none for basics.

Not for posting — for the record. A surprising number of people, especially over forty, check Facebook the way others check Google. Hours, phone, address, the one-sentence description, a real photo. If you never post a single update, a correct page still does its job.

6. The one vertical directory that matters for you

Every industry has one directory that customers and machines both actually read. One done well beats forty done badly:

If you are a…	Your sixth listing is probably
Contractor, cleaner, trades	Angi (or your licensing board’s public directory)
Restaurant, café	TripAdvisor or OpenTable
Lawyer	Avvo
Doctor, dentist, therapist	Healthgrades or Psychology Today
Wedding vendor	The Knot or Zola
Accountant, bookkeeper	Your state CPA society directory
Auto repair	Carfax or RepairPal

If your vertical isn’t here, ask one good customer where they’d look. Their answer is your sixth listing.

What about the other 194 directories?

Skip them, for now. The citation-service industry will email you spreadsheets of “essential” directories; nearly all of them exist to sell the spreadsheet. The rule:

• Below six listings: claiming the six above is the highest-value hour in this manual.
• The six done, facts consistent, ten-plus reviews: then a handful of extras can help — your chamber of commerce, Nextdoor if you’re residential-facing, and anything your actual customers name.
• Someone selling you 80 citations for $299: no. The six plus consistency beats bulk submission, and bulk-submitted listings rot — they’re the wrong hours and old phone numbers you’ll be cleaning up in page 3.2.

The maintenance deal

Listings aren’t a launch, they’re a garden — a small one. Once a quarter, and whenever your hours, prices, or services change, walk the six and re-paste the fact block. The quarterly surface check folds this into a 40-minute routine, and the Findability Checkup will tell you which of the six is currently costing you the most.