Why AI recommends some Ugandan businesses and not others

Something has changed in how people look for a business

For twenty years, finding a plumber meant typing "plumber Kampala" into Google and picking from a list of blue links. That still happens. But a growing number of people now ask a question instead - to ChatGPT, to Gemini, to the AI answer that appears at the top of Google itself - and they get back a short answer with two or three suggestions rather than a page of links.

The person asking does not see a list they can scroll through. They see an answer. If your business is not in it, there is no second page to be found on. That is the whole change, and it matters more for small businesses than for large ones.

Where those answers come from

An AI assistant does not know anything about your business by itself. It has read an enormous amount of text from the public web, and when it is asked a current question it usually searches the web there and then and summarises what it finds. Either way, the raw material is the same: pages that somebody published.

So the question is not whether an AI likes your business. It is whether there is anything written about your business for it to find. A shop with a Facebook page and nothing else has almost nothing in that pool. A shop with a website that says what it does, where it is, what it charges and what hours it keeps has a great deal.

This is also why the answers tend to name the same few businesses over and over. Those are the ones that published something. It is not favouritism, and it is not expensive to fix.

What actually helps

Plain facts, written as text on a page you control. What you do, stated in the words a customer would use rather than in marketing language. Where you are, with a landmark somebody would recognise. Your hours. Your prices, or a realistic range. Which areas you serve or deliver to. The questions customers ask you every day, written out with the answers.

That last one matters more than people expect. An assistant answering "how much does it cost to fix a cracked phone screen in Kampala" is looking for a page that answers exactly that. If yours is the only one that does, yours is the page it draws from.

A verified Google Business Profile helps as well, because its information about your name, location, hours and reviews is structured and widely reused. Set it up properly and keep it accurate. It is free and it takes an afternoon.

What does not help

Text sitting inside an image. A menu photographed as a printed sheet, a price list posted as a picture, a poster with your services on it - none of that can be read. To a search engine and to an AI, an image of words is a blank space. Type it out as text instead.

Being only on social media. Posts disappear down a feed within a day and much of that content is not readily available to be read and summarised. Keep your Facebook and Instagram for the customers you already have, and publish the facts on a site you own.

Trying to trick the machine. Stuffing a page with repeated phrases, publishing invented reviews, or generating dozens of near-identical pages is detected, and it costs you the whole site rather than just those pages. The thing that works is unglamorous: be the business that has actually written down what it does.

This is the same work that already pays

Here is the reassuring part. Everything listed above is exactly what makes a website useful to a human being anyway. Clear services, honest prices, real opening hours, directions that work, answers to common questions. Businesses that did that five years ago are the ones the AI tools are recommending now, and they did not do it for the AI.

So there is no separate AI strategy to buy. There is a website that states the facts plainly, kept up to date, on a domain you own. That has always been the advice. The change is that the cost of not having one has gone up.