Phil Risher explains why local businesses need to explicitly define their service areas. Set them in your Google Business Profile and create dedicated pages for each city you serve, or AI and search engines won't know where you operate.
Local service area is extremely important for Google search, but also for these platforms and even more important for AI because you can't tell AI where you service. You have to create content so that it trains them on where you service. The way that you do this is you make sure your Google Business Profile has the service areas, but on your website, you need to have service area pages. So you need to have pages broken out for all the specific cities that you serve. So that way they know that you serve this area, because if you don't have that, how is it going to know that you service those areas? It's very, very important. And a lot of people miss this from a local perspective.
