The companion to Word of Mouth is Dead
Step 2 of Feed the Mouth was "get talked about." This is that step, in full, with the actual instructions, the real costs, and the things that will get you banned.
Read this bit first. Nothing in here is about your website. Your website is not the problem. The problem is that AI assistants do not take your word for who you are, they take everyone else's. Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands: being mentioned somewhere correlated with AI visibility at 0.66. Backlinks came in around 0.22. A separate study of 23,387 citations found 48% came from earned media and only 23% from a brand's own website. Both sets of authors say plainly that correlation is not causation, and so do I. But every independent dataset points the same way: the job is to be talked about somewhere that isn't yours.
Ordered by value per hour for a Perth business owner with no marketing team. Do them in this order. If you only ever do the first block, you will still be ahead of most of your competitors.
| What | Cost | Time | Worth it? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | FREE | 90 min | Non-negotiable. Everything else assumes this is done. |
| Free Australian directory listings | FREE | 75 min total | Yes. One evening, done forever. |
| Business News company profile | FREE | 5 min | One email. Absurdly under-used. |
| LinkedIn articles | FREE | 1–1.5 hr/wk | Yes. Heavily cited, and you don't need followers. |
| FREE | 30 min/wk | Yes, carefully. Most-cited domain, highest ban risk. | |
| YouTube | FREE | 2 hr/video | Yes if your customers use Google. Weak for ChatGPT. |
| Industry association directory | Varies | 1 hr | Yes for regulated trades and professions. Highest-trust citation available. |
| Your own "best of" comparison page | FREE | 4–6 hr | Yes, with disclosure. See the six rules. |
| Quora | FREE | 30 min/wk | Only if you sell beyond WA. Australia isn't in its top 5 countries. |
| Business awards | $$$ | Days | Enter if you want the credential anyway. Slow, and it's not an AI tactic. |
| hipages | $139–649/mo | — | Trades only, and read this before you sign anything. |
| Bulk directory submissions | Free–$$ | A weekend | No. Link-farm filler. Skip entirely. |
Do all of this in one sitting. Have your business name, address, phone, ABN and a short description open in a notes app first, and paste the identical text everywhere. Not similar. Identical. That consistency is the join key AI systems use to work out that six different listings are all you.
Verification in Australia is now usually by video. Google says: "If your business is eligible for video verification, we recommend that you use this option." Review takes up to 5 business days.
You get roughly three goes. Google flags profiles for suspicious activity after a few failed attempts and your approval odds collapse. Google doesn't publish the number. Before you press record, have ready: your signage, your vehicle, your tools or stock, the street frontage, and your phone or laptop already logged into the business email or booking system. Film one continuous take, no cuts. Outside → inside → proof you manage the place. If you fail, fix the problem before retrying.
Then fill in, in this order of importance:
Don't overstate what Google has said. Google documented in June 2026 that Gemini connects to Business Profile data so you can manage your listing. Google has not published a statement that Business Profile feeds AI Overviews. Anyone telling you otherwise is inferring. Do GBP properly because every assistant answering a local question is reading Maps data underneath, not because of a press release.
| Platform | Cost | Who it suits | Do this |
|---|---|---|---|
| Word of Mouth wordofmouth.com.au | Free to claim | All business types | Claim it. Your listing may already exist because the first customer to review you creates it, so check the details are right. Generates "The 25 Best Plumbers in Perth" style pages that assistants read. |
| Localsearch | Free, stays free | All | "Add a Business", verify by code, exact NAP match. Expect a sales call afterwards. Say no politely, keep the free listing. |
| ProductReview.com.au | Free Starter tier | Products, brands, services | Claim it and reply to every review. Note a credit card is required even on the free tier, and taking Starter burns your future free trial. |
| Trustpilot | Free tier | All, strongest for services and e-commerce | Claim the free profile and invite real customers. Observed in Australian AI answers via Gemini specifically. Free tier caps your review invitations, which is fine at this stage. |
| Yellow Pages | Free listing | All | Claim the free listing for the citation. Never buy the advertising, see Part 5. |
| True Local | Free | All | Zombie property under the same owner as Yellow Pages. 15 minutes once, for consistency. Then forget it. |
| Airtasker | Free to list and quote | Odd jobs, cleaning, removals, handyman | Free profile, commission only on won work (12.5–20%). No downside. Wrong fit for professional services, manufacturing, health, hospitality. |
Oneflare is dead. It retired on 30 June 2026 and folded into Airtasker. You cannot list on it. Its pages are still live and still being cited by AI assistants, which is a useful lesson in itself: AI citations lag reality by months. If an assistant recommends a competitor from an Oneflare page, that page may be describing a business that no longer exists either.
Business News is WA's most authoritative business publication and it maintains indexed company profiles. It states it welcomes "all opportunities to make our dataset accurate, complete and current."
To: general@businessnews.com.au
Subject: Company profile — [Your Business]
Hi, could you please add or correct our company profile? [Name], [suburb], founded [year], [staff count], [what you do in one sentence], [website].
Note the limitation: much of Business News' deeper content sits behind a subscription wall, and a paywalled mention is a weaker citation than a free one. The profile stub is public, which is the bit that matters here.
LinkedIn is heavily cited by AI assistants. Semrush measured 89,000 distinct LinkedIn URLs cited across 325,000 prompts: it appeared in 14.3% of ChatGPT Search responses and 13.5% of Google AI Mode.
Semrush, 10 March 2026, 89,000 cited URLs. Semrush states it collaborated with LinkedIn on this study, so it is measured but not fully independent. Other vendors rank LinkedIn lower for general consumer queries, so treat it as strong for B2B and professional services and weaker for trades.
Roughly 60% of cited LinkedIn content is educational or advice content. Promotional content is cited far less. Keep a running note on your phone: every time a customer asks you something, write the question down. That list is your content calendar, and those questions are by definition the things people type into AI assistants.
AI engines paraphrase LinkedIn less than they paraphrase Reddit or Quora, they quote closer to your actual words. So put the direct answer in the first paragraph, in plain sentences.
Check one setting. If your profile's public visibility switch is off, your profile deindexes from search engines within weeks. Settings → Visibility → Edit your public profile → make sure it's on.
And don't expect Google traffic. LinkedIn article traffic from Google has fallen roughly 85–89% since March 2024. Its value as an AI-citation channel is strong and measured. Its value as an SEO channel is mostly gone. Those are different things.
Perth note: nearly all "best time to post" advice comes from US datasets. Perth is UTC+8, so a post timed for "9am Tuesday" per an American guide lands in the middle of your night. Post to WA business hours.
Reddit is the most-cited domain across AI assistants. It is also the easiest place on this list to do lasting damage to yourself.
First, kill the myth. The "9:1 rule", one in ten posts may be your own content, is not Reddit policy. It comes from Reddiquette, which Reddit's own page describes as "an informal expression of the values of many redditors, as written by redditors themselves," and calls 9:1 "a widely used rule of thumb." No Reddit system counts your ratio. Every SEO blog presenting it as a rule is wrong.
What Reddit actually says, in Rule 2: "Abide by community rules. Post authentic content into communities where you have a personal interest." Reddit delegates the promotion question to each subreddit. So the only question that ever matters is: what does this specific subreddit allow?
reddit.com/r/[name]/about/rules, this URL always works.[removed], you have your answer.Comment on 3–5 posts a week where you can genuinely help, without mentioning your business at all. This is not manipulation, many subreddits have invisible karma and account-age gates, and this is how you meet entry requirements that exist specifically to keep spammers out. This is also why your first post disappeared: you weren't banned, you were below a threshold you can't see.
The single test: would this comment still be worth posting if you had no business at all? If no, don't post it.
The one thing that will destroy you. Do not use a second account, and do not ask staff, family or friends to recommend you. Reddit's ban-evasion filtering catches the follow-up accounts, and the worst outcome isn't the ban, it's your business name being added to a subreddit's automatic blocklist, so that even genuine customers mentioning you get auto-removed. That is very hard to undo. In Australia it is also potentially illegal, see Part 7.
Reddit sued a university in 2025 over undisclosed AI personas. Its Chief Legal Officer called it "deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level." That's the posture. One person, one account, always says who they are. That's the whole compliance regime.
Worth knowing: Reddit's $60M/year content deal with Google was reported in July 2026 to be at risk of non-renewal, and Reddit has discussed blocking Google's AI access. That was unresolved as of mid-August. The OpenAI deal is separate and active, and Reddit gets cited partly because it's genuinely useful rather than purely because of licensing. But don't treat Reddit-as-AI-source as permanent.
Ahrefs found YouTube mentions were the single strongest correlate of AI visibility of everything they measured across 75,000 brands, at 0.737, above branded web mentions at 0.664 and well above backlinks at roughly 0.22.
Know which AI you're playing for. YouTube is overwhelmingly a Google-surface play. If your customers are asking ChatGPT specifically, LinkedIn is the better use of your time.
You do not need to become a creator. The data is unusually clear on this. Of videos that get cited by AI: 40.8% have fewer than 1,000 views, 36% have fewer than 15 likes, and half the cited channels have fewer than 41 videos total. Views, likes and subscriber count all correlate with citation at roughly zero. What does correlate is description length (+0.31) and recency. Popularity is not the mechanism. Structure is.
Why fixing captions matters here specifically. Measured accuracy of YouTube's automatic captions: proper names wrong 45% of the time and accented English at 82.4%. Your business name and your suburb are proper names, and a broad Australian accent is accented English. The assistants aren't watching your video, they're reading the transcript. If the transcript says "Perth pumbing serviss", that's what gets indexed.
Be honest with yourself about this one. Quora is alive and large, 299 million monthly visits and growing, so "Quora is dead" is wrong. But 47.6% of its traffic is American, 10% is Indian, and Australia does not appear in its top five countries. For a Perth plumber, dentist or café, the people reading your answer about Perth hard water are statistically in Ohio and Hyderabad.
Do Reddit first. Do Quora only if you have time left over, or if you're a manufacturer, exporter or B2B firm whose market genuinely isn't geographically bounded, in which case it's worth more to you than to a local trade.
If you do use it, Quora's rules are gentler than Reddit's and stated plainly:
site:quora.com [your topic]. Questions already ranking in Google are the ones assistants are most likely to encounter.When someone asks an assistant "who are the best X in Perth", it pulls heavily from roundup pages. There are four routes in, and only three are worth using.
| Route | Cost | Realistic? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Be listed and well-reviewed on the directory that auto-generates the page | $0 | Highest | Word of Mouth, Localsearch, Yelp and others auto-generate "The 25 Best Plumbers in Perth" pages from their own listings. Claim the profile, collect real reviews, and you're in the roundup automatically. This is the answer for most of you. |
| 2. Free submission to ranking sites | $0 | Medium | ThreeBestRated and similar. Submit free, take the badge, and ignore any later request for a "donation" to stay listed. |
| 3. Cold outreach to independent publishers | $0 + time | Medium-low | Only works if you give them something: data, a genuine story, expert commentary, exclusive photos. "Please add me to your list" gets ignored. |
| 4. Paid placement | Not published, you must ask for a media kit | High if you pay | Most Perth lifestyle listicles are commercial products and label the result "Sponsored." |
Why route 1 beats route 4 even if you have the money. A sponsored entry is disclosed as sponsored, and assistants can increasingly read that disclosure. You'd be paying for a mention explicitly labelled as paid, which is worth less as a citation than free inclusion in an auto-generated roundup you earned with 40 real reviews.
This is legitimate, and there's a working Perth example. A tattoo removal clinic publishes "The 10 Best Laser Tattoo Removal Clinics in Perth (2026)", names nine real competitors, ranks itself first, and discloses it in the opening paragraph, unprompted: "This article is published by [us]. We are one of the clinics in this list, and we finish at number one. If that makes you sceptical, good, it should."
That disclosure is the entire reason it works. It turns an obviously self-serving page into a defensible editorial one. It is also not a breach of Google's site reputation abuse policy, which targets third-party content published on someone else's domain, not content you write on your own.
If you're in health, legal or financial services, get advice before you publish a ranking page. AHPRA advertising rules and professional body codes apply on top of everything above.
A listing in an industry body's member directory is a credentialed citation. "Listed in the Master Plumbers WA find-a-member directory" carries different weight to "listed on a free directory anyone can join." For regulated trades and professions this is the highest-trust, lowest-noise citation available.
| Body | Sector | Cost | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australian Tourism Data Warehouse FREE | Tourism, hospitality, accommodation, attractions | Free for WA operators | The best free listing in this entire document for hospitality. Syndicates to westernaustralia.com and hundreds of tourism sites. Generated 198,000 leads to industry in 2024/25. |
| Master Plumbers & Gasfitters WA | Plumbing, gas | Not published | Public "Find a Master Plumber" directory. Only currently-financial licensed members listed, which is exactly why it's a strong signal. |
| Master Builders WA | Building, construction | Not published | Public Perth Builders Directory. 1,700+ member organisations. |
| Buy West Eat Best | WA food producers, manufacturers, hospitality | Not published | Public member directory browsable by category and WA region. Excellent WA-specific fit. |
| Australian Made | Manufacturing | From $300 + GST/yr | Rare case of a fully published fee ladder, scaling with turnover. |
| Law Society of WA / Legal Practice Board | Legal | Membership / regulatory | Public registers, authoritative and crawlable. |
Almost no Australian industry association publishes its membership fees online. Every body above except Australian Made makes you ask. That's normal, not a red flag, but budget for a phone call.
PerthNow local papers are the realistic target, not The West. There are 11 editions from Yanchep to Mandurah, they publish weekly, they need local stories every week, and the content goes online where it can be crawled. That is the softest genuine entry point in WA media.
Give them a story, not an ad. Hiring ten apprentices. Sponsoring a local club. A 25-year anniversary. Responding to a storm. "We do good plumbing" is not a story. Send a short email with a photo attached, a phone number, and one line on why it matters to that suburb.
Time-critical: WA Business Awards registration closes 24 August 2026. Categories include Micro and Small Business, which are genuinely accessible. Submissions due 11 September, gala 3 December. Entry fee is not published, you have to ask.
Telstra Best of Business and AIM WA Pinnacle both closed for 2026. 40under40 reopens around October ($420 inc GST, published).
Awards are the slowest and most expensive item in this playbook. Enter them if you want the credential anyway, not for AI citations, the lag is four months. And the real citation value isn't the award, it's the page you write about it. A finalist gets one line in a list. A finalist who publishes "why we entered and what we learned", links to the official finalist page, and posts it to their Google Business Profile has made something crawlable and quotable. The award is raw material. You do the manufacturing.
| Don't | Why |
|---|---|
| Buy an llms.txt file | Google has said twice, June 2025 and June 2026, that no AI system uses it. |
| Pay a premium for "AI schema" | Google's own docs: "there's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add." The best controlled study, 1,885 pages against 4,000 controls, found no uplift. |
| Buy "guaranteed placement in ChatGPT" | OpenAI's own documentation: "There is no way to guarantee top placement." |
| Trust a report showing your "AI ranking position" | Asked 100 times, there's under a 1 in 100 chance of the same list twice. In August 2026 the industry's own standards body said there is still no agreed definition of what a mention is. |
| Spend a weekend on bulk free directory submissions | Hotfrog, StartLocal, dLook, AussieWeb and the rest are link-farm filler with near-zero citation value. |
| Buy guest posts on "write for us" sites | Paid link schemes. Avoid. |
| Sign up to hipages without reading the contract | See below. |
hipages, specifically, because a lot of you will be asked. It is not a directory listing, it is a lead auction you pay to enter. Published plans run roughly $139–$649/month ex GST. Leads cost 75–120 credits each, so the entry plan is about two leads a month before you're buying top-ups. Each lead is shared with up to three competing tradies. The term is 6 months, then auto-renews for 12, and cancelling mid-term can make the remaining fees fall due. hipages does not publish its pricing on a publicly accessible page, these figures come from a third-party review, so demand written pricing and full contract terms before you sign anything.
It is trades and home services only. A manufacturer, accountant, physio or restaurant has no business there. And it is a customer-acquisition channel, not an AI-citation strategy. If an assistant cites your hipages page it's because of the reviews on it, and you can get that same citation value from free platforms.
Yellow Pages advertising. Claim the free listing, then never take their call. Paid tier pricing is deliberately unpublished. Their managed website plans run $59–$99/month plus $999–$3,999 setup, 12-month minimum, auto-renewing, with a cancellation fee equal to the remaining contract value. This is the single most common product Perth businesses have been burned by.
Everything above, sequenced. About two hours a week after the first fortnight.
Google Business Profile claimed, verified and filled properly. Word of Mouth, Localsearch, ProductReview, Trustpilot, Yellow Pages free listing, True Local. Business News email sent. Nothing else. If you stop here you've still done the most valuable part.
Reddit account created, email verified, profile bio written, r/perth joined, rules read. LinkedIn public visibility switch checked. Start the phone note of customer questions.
Reddit: 3–5 helpful comments a week, no business mention, no links. LinkedIn: one short post a week (50–299 words) answering a real customer question.
LinkedIn: keep the weekly post going, and publish one article of 500–2,000 words, remember the Manage tab. Reddit: start answering as a professional, identifying your trade in one clause. YouTube: create the channel, film and publish your first two videos with proper descriptions, chapters and corrected captions.
Three more YouTube videos. A second LinkedIn article. Apply to your industry association. Ask your ten best customers for a review on Google and Word of Mouth, genuinely, with no incentive attached. If it fits you, draft your own comparison page using the six rules above.
The same four prompts from the talk. Compare against what you got in the room on 20 August. Don't check sooner. Answers move around run-to-run and you'll read noise as progress.
None of this appears in the American guides you'll find online, and all of it applies here.
"It's against the law for a business to create fake or misleading reviews or to arrange for others to do so." That explicitly includes reviews "written by family, employees, or people paid in some way by the business to write the review, without stating the personal connection." Note that the review does not have to be false, the undisclosed connection alone is the breach.
Penalties on record: Citymove $6,600 · Service Seeking $600,000 · HealthEngine $2.9 million.
So a Reddit comment saying "I used them, they were great" from your apprentice or your partner isn't just a platform rule breach. It's conduct the ACCC has said is illegal.
Dentists, physios, chiros, psychologists, GPs, podiatrists, optometrists, nurses. Testimonials about the clinical aspects of a regulated health service are prohibited in advertising under section 133 of the National Law. A statement is a testimonial if it references symptoms, diagnosis or treatment, or outcomes. Comments about customer service alone are not.
The good news: AHPRA's guidance says you are not responsible for testimonials on platforms you don't control. A patient praising you in an r/perth thread is not your advertising. But asking patients to go and recommend you there would make it yours. Don't.
r/AusFinance has 837,000 members and its dominant topics are advice requests, property and super. Answering a specific person's specific financial situation may constitute personal financial advice, which is a licensed activity. Accountants, brokers and advisers: check your licence obligations, and keep to general factual information rather than anything responsive to an individual's circumstances.
None of this is proven to cause AI citations. The correlations are real and consistent across independent datasets, and the researchers who produced them say plainly that correlation is not causation. I'm telling you that because the people who don't tell you that are selling something.
What is certain: AI assistants do not take your word for who you are. They read what other people and other places say about you. If nowhere other than your own website discusses your business, you have given them nothing to work with. Everything in this document is a way of giving them something.
And it still doesn't substitute for being good at your job. Getting named by a machine that then sends people to read your reviews only helps if the reviews are good.
No charge, no pitch. Email your domain and I'll send back what the models actually say about you, where they got it, and which of the four steps you need.