AI Visibility & LLM Optimization in Burnaby
Make AI recommend your Burnaby business instead of defaulting to Vancouver
Burnaby carries two university campuses, a large games studio and a working tech corridor inside a city of 250,000 — an unusually technical resident base for a suburb, and one that reaches for an assistant rather than a search box more readily than most. The trouble is that assistants inherit the same regional habit Google has: asked about Burnaby, they answer about Vancouver.
How an Assistant Actually Decides Who to Name
It helps to know what is happening when someone asks an assistant for a dentist in Burnaby, because the answer is not a ranking and it is not a list. Two different things are going on, and they behave differently. The first is what the model absorbed during training. That is a frozen snapshot, months old by the time you are using it, and nothing you do this quarter changes it. If your business was well described across the open web when that snapshot was taken, you benefit. If it was not, you wait for the next one. The second is retrieval — the assistant running a search while it answers you and reading what comes back. That part is live, it responds to changes in weeks rather than never, and it is where essentially all of the practical work sits. This matters because it tells you what is worth paying for. Anyone selling you influence over a model's training data is selling something they cannot deliver. What can be delivered is making sure that when an assistant goes looking mid-answer, what it finds about you is clear, consistent, corroborated by someone other than you, and unambiguous about which city you are in. The other consequence is that answers are not stable. Ask the same question twice and you can get two different sets of names. Ask it slightly differently and the set changes again. That is how these systems work, not a fault to be fixed, and it shapes how the results can honestly be measured.
What Actually Moves an Assistant's Answer
A page that answers the question directly
Assistants pull passages, not pages. Copy that states plainly what you do, where, for whom, and at roughly what price gets quoted. Copy that opens with a paragraph about your passion for excellence gets skipped, because there is nothing in it to extract.
Corroboration that is not you
A model weighs your own site lightly, because every business claims to be good. Being described consistently by a directory, an association, a review body, local press or a supplier is what turns a claim into something an assistant will repeat.
One city, stated the same way everywhere
The same clerical consistency that matters for Google matters more here, because an assistant resolving a contradiction between Burnaby on your site and Vancouver on your listings will usually resolve it toward the larger, better-attested place.
Town centre named explicitly
Metrotown, Brentwood, Lougheed and Edmonds are how people describe where they are in this city. A page that names the one you serve gives an assistant the phrase it needs to match a question against.
Structured data that states the plain facts
Name, address, municipality, coordinates, hours, services, prices where you publish them. It does not override a contradiction elsewhere, and it is not a ranking trick — it removes ambiguity, which is a smaller claim and a true one.
llms.txt, with honest expectations
A plain-text summary of your site at a predictable path. It is a proposed convention, not a standard the major assistants have committed to honouring, and we are not going to tell you it is the lever. It costs almost nothing and carries no downside, which is the whole of the case for it.
Why the Vancouver Default Is Harder to Break Here Than in Google
Burnaby's identity problem is familiar from search, but it lands harder in an assistant, for a structural reason. Google can hedge. It returns ten results, and if two of them are Burnaby businesses and eight are Vancouver ones, you are still on the page and a Burnaby-intent searcher can find you. An assistant names three businesses, or one. There is no second page to be on. Being absorbed into Vancouver is not a lower position; it is absence. The underlying cause is the same, and it is not malice or a bug. The sources these systems read describe this region as Metro Vancouver far more often than they describe it as a set of municipalities. Enough Burnaby businesses call themselves Vancouver businesses that the pattern is reinforced from the inside. And people genuinely do say Vancouver when they mean the region, so a model that answers a Burnaby question with Vancouver names is, a good share of the time, giving the answer that was actually wanted. What follows is a two-part job rather than a correction. Make every source an assistant can reach agree that you are in Burnaby, and specifically in the town centre you work in. Then, separately and on purpose, be findable for the regional phrasing your customers actually use, because a meaningful number of them will ask about Vancouver no matter where they live. The failure mode to avoid is the tempting one: relabelling yourself as a Vancouver business to catch the regional question. It surrenders the searches you could own cheaply in exchange for a contest with downtown Vancouver that you will not win, and it feeds the exact ambiguity that caused the problem.
What This Work Can and Cannot Do
What we can genuinely affect
What nobody can do, us included
Burnaby AI Visibility — Common Questions
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend us?
No, and be wary of anyone who says otherwise. There is no placement to buy and no ranking to hold. What we can do is make sure that when an assistant searches while answering, what it finds about you is clear, consistent and corroborated — and then measure whether that changed the answers.
How is this different from the SEO you already sell us?
It overlaps more than the industry likes to admit — consistent listings and clear pages help both. The differences are real but narrower than the marketing suggests: assistants weigh third-party corroboration more heavily, quote passages rather than link pages, and give one answer instead of ten. If you are buying our Burnaby SEO, a good part of this is already being done.
Does llms.txt actually work?
It is a proposed convention rather than something the major assistants have committed to reading, and we have no evidence it is doing the heavy lifting. We deploy it because it costs almost nothing and has no downside, not because it is the mechanism. Anyone presenting it as the mechanism is overselling it.
How do you measure something with no rankings?
By asking. We run a fixed set of questions a real Burnaby buyer would ask across five assistants on a schedule, record whether you are named, who is named instead, and how you are described. Because the answers vary run to run, we ask repeatedly and report the pattern rather than a single result — which is a weaker instrument than a rank tracker, and we would rather say so than dress it up.
Is a Burnaby business better off just targeting Vancouver?
No. Assistants name very few businesses, so a contest with downtown Vancouver is one you lose quietly and completely. Own Burnaby and your town centre first, where the field is thin and the signals are cheap to fix, then go after regional phrasing deliberately with content rather than by relabelling yourself.
How long before anything changes?
The retrieval side responds in weeks, because you are removing ambiguity rather than building authority. Corroboration from third parties takes longer, since it depends on other people publishing. And the training-data side does not respond on any schedule you control. Anyone quoting you a date is quoting you a guess.
What does it cost?
LLM setup is $500 CAD one-time and monthly monitoring is $300 CAD. If you are already on our Burnaby SEO retainer, say so — a fair amount of the setup is work that retainer is doing anyway, and there is no sense charging you twice for it.
See What the Assistants Say About You Today
We will ask five assistants the questions a Burnaby buyer in your category actually asks, record who gets named and how you are described when you come up at all, and show you which of it is a Vancouver-default problem and which is your own sources disagreeing about where you are.
Check Your AI Visibility ScoreAreas We Serve
AI visibility works market-wide — when someone near SFU, at Metrotown, or in Edmonds asks an AI about local services, your Burnaby business appears as the definitive authority rather than a Vancouver backup.
Pricing
LLM setup: $500 CAD one-time. Monthly AI visibility monitoring: $300/month.
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