Ask ChatGPT or Gemini "good aircon repair near Sukhumvit" and the answer often includes a map card: names, pins, ratings. If you run a local business, understand one thing about that card before spending another baht on your website:
Your website cannot get you onto it.
Where the card actually comes from
The map card is not assembled from crawled websites. It pulls from the platforms' own merchant databases — Google Business Profile on one side, Apple Business Connect (feeding Apple Maps, which several AI products use for local results) on the other. We've watched the citation URLs on local-intent questions in our own testing: they resolve to map platform links, not to business websites.
This means local visibility splits into two separate games:
- The web game — being readable and quotable when AI composes text answers. Your website matters here.
- The map game — appearing on the location card for "near me" intent. Only merchant registries matter here.
A perfect score in one game earns you nothing in the other. Businesses lose months optimizing the website for an intent the website cannot win. (We sell website optimization, so take this as against-interest honesty: for map-card visibility, we'd be taking your money for the wrong lever.)
The map game playbook
- Claim both profiles. Google Business Profile and Apple Business Connect are both free. Most Thai businesses have half-claimed the first and never touched the second — Apple's registry is the emptier, lower-competition side.
- Fill everything, precisely: exact name, address, phone, hours, category (use the platform's official category names), photos that are really yours. Complete profiles rank ahead of skeletal ones for the platform's own reasons; you're just qualifying.
- Keep name, address and phone identical everywhere — profiles, website, directories, social pages. Character-for-character. Inconsistent basics are how registries decide two records might be different businesses, or one unreliable one.
- Accumulate real reviews, steadily. Ask actual customers at the natural moment. Never buy reviews: platforms actively detect purchased patterns, and the penalty (suppression or removal) lands on the exact surface you're trying to win.
- Point the profile at your website and the website at the profile. The two games are separate but the records should agree; agreement is trust.
What your website still does for local intent
Text answers still quote websites — for "is X reliable", "what does X charge", "does X cover my area", the composed answer draws on your pages even when a map card sits above it. So the split is not either/or; it's knowing which lever moves which surface. Fix your merchant profiles for the card. Fix your website for the sentences around it. Budget accordingly, and be suspicious of anyone selling one as a substitute for the other.