Say you run a massage and bodywork studio in Yonghe, New Taipei, with two therapists. Most of your customers are office workers nearby who come in for an hour after work. Bookings come by phone and LINE, your website shows your opening hours and “full-body massage from NT$1,200”, and you’re on Google Maps. One day an office worker who lives in Zhonghe doesn’t pick up the phone himself. He hands the job to an AI agent and lets it go online to look things up and book: “Book me a full-body massage, one hour, this Friday after 8pm, in Yonghe or Zhonghe, under NT$1,500, and let me know when it’s done.”

To book you, the agent has three hurdles to clear: whether it can work out what you’d charge for an hour on a Friday evening; whether it can find out online if you’re free on Friday evening and how to book; and whether the hours you’ve written on your website, Google Maps and elsewhere agree with each other. Neither ChatGPT nor Google has said how agents choose a business, so these three hurdles are our own way of putting it. The one we think gets overlooked most is the second: for a business that only takes bookings by phone or LINE, the most the agent can tell the customer is “the price fits; whether they have a slot, you’ll have to ask yourself”.

What isn’t online, Google phones to ask about in the US

A shop selling products can put each item’s price, stock and shipping into a feed and hand it straight to platforms like Google, and that’s what agents compare when shopping for people. Service businesses have nothing like that to hand over, and neither does anything booked ahead and made to the customer’s spec, like custom cakes or private hire. What an hour’s massage costs, whether choosing a therapist costs extra, how late you can book on a Friday: mostly that lives in the owner’s head and in LINE chats, and only comes out when a customer asks.

Google’s AI Mode does something about that gap. According to Google, customers can ask it to find prices for a service and check for available slots, and if the information isn’t online, it will phone the business to ask, for example about the earliest available time. But Google’s help page for businesses lists only the US for those calls. AI Mode has been available in Traditional Chinese in Taiwan since October 2025, but the features that act for customers haven’t followed: Google says they currently support only English, with Hindi added for restaurant bookings, and while restaurant booking has reached Hong Kong and Singapore, Taiwan isn’t on the list yet. Nor did we find any agent that phones businesses in Taiwan on a customer’s behalf.

So in Taiwan, all an agent has to go on is what you’ve written online and the ways you let people book, and those two things have to get you through all three hurdles.

Write “from” and the agent can’t work out the price

The customer wants Friday evening, one hour, no particular therapist, under NT$1,500; your website says “full-body massage from NT$1,200”. A customer reading “from” would ring and ask, but an agent reading it can’t work out what he’d actually pay. Is an hour simply NT$1,200? Is there an evening surcharge? If any one of those can’t be worked out, it can’t say “this one is within your budget”.

What the agent needs is how your prices are worked out: how the length is charged, whether choosing a therapist costs extra, whether evenings or weekends cost more. Put that in a sentence or two and it can work out the total for the customer’s request itself. Plenty of owners leave it out for fear of competitors comparing prices, but the customer’s instruction already carries a budget, and a business whose price can’t be worked out may not even make it into the comparison. Businesses that can only quote after seeing the job, like home plumbing and electrical repairs or fitted cabinets, can still say what the price depends on and roughly what range it falls in; the line-by-line quote can stay on the phone.

Wherever the agent can’t see further, it stops

Agents don’t take a booking all the way through anyway. OpenAI wrote in an update at the end of August this year that when ChatGPT is acting on the web for someone and reaches certain sites that need a login, it hands the login screen to the user to fill in, sometimes with a CAPTCHA too, and it always checks with the user before completing actions such as bookings or payments. In the US, Google’s AI Mode handles restaurant and beauty bookings the same way, listing options with free slots and linking out so the customer finishes on a partner booking site. So handing the last step back to the customer isn’t a failure; what matters is how much the agent found out before it did.

Suppose there are three massage studios around Yonghe and Zhonghe, all with their pricing spelled out. The first is yours, taking bookings only by phone and LINE. No agent in Taiwan phones businesses for customers yet, and LINE means the customer adding you as a friend and messaging from their own phone, a step that mostly has to be left to them too, so the agent’s report stops at “the price fits; whether they have a slot, you’ll have to ask yourself”. The second has an online booking page, but you have to register and log in before you can see which slots are free; the agent has to stop at the login and still doesn’t know whether Friday evening is free. The third’s booking page shows free slots and prices without logging in, and only asks the customer to log in and pay a deposit at the very end, so the agent can check everything first and then hand over: “Friday at 8:30 is free, NT$1,200 for an hour; you just need to log in and pay the deposit.”

No platform has said how an agent ranks those three, but it stands to reason that the one where it has already checked everything for the customer stands the best chance of being booked. That doesn’t mean scrapping LINE or deposits: regulars booking on LINE and a deposit against no-shows can both stay. A business that only takes phone bookings doesn’t have to switch systems straight away either, but it should at least put how its prices are worked out, and which days and times can be booked each week, online where an agent can find them.

Your website, Business Profile and booking page have to tell the same story about times

Even past the first two hurdles, the agent will compare what you’ve written in different places. Say you extended your hours to 10pm last year and updated your website, but your Google Business Profile still says 9pm. On your booking page, the last one-hour slot on a Friday is 8:30pm, which is right, since your therapists finish at ten and need time to clear up, but your website doesn’t say how late you can book. The agent wants to know how late it can book on Friday evening and reads three answers: your website says open until ten, your Business Profile says nine, and the booking page’s last slot is half past eight. Our guess is that the likeliest thing it does then is move on to a business whose details agree.

Times also change at short notice. When you close for Lunar New Year or a typhoon, one line on LINE tells your regulars, but the website and Business Profile often get forgotten. And there will be one more thing to keep in line: LINE Taiwan announced in October that it aims, in the first quarter of 2027, to let businesses build their own AI agent inside an official account to handle customers’ bookings. The platform isn’t out yet, but when it is, the rota you give it will be one more copy that has to match your website and Business Profile. That agent works on your side; an agent working for the customer still has to find you and work out your price from what you’ve written online, so that needs doing now.

Only asking AI shows which hurdle you’re stuck at

The hurdles can’t be fixed one at a time, either. Once your pricing is on your website, your Business Profile and booking page have to say the same; open a booking page where slots can be seen without logging in, and the “call to book” line on your website has to go, or the agent reads two different ways of booking. And which hurdle you’re stuck at doesn’t show from your side at all: when an agent can’t work out your price, stops at your login page or gets muddled by two closing times, you never find out. The only way is to ask from AI’s side: ask it what an hour costs at your place, how late you can book on Friday, and how customers book you, and when it gets something wrong, work back to which page led it there.

The fixing, and the checking afterwards, can be handed to our managed GEO service: we fix your website content, bring what’s said about you elsewhere into line, then regularly ask each AI tool how it describes you, and the questions include the three above. You just look at the results.

You don’t have to wait for agents to catch on to ask those three questions, either. To see whether ChatGPT can answer them today, you can book a demo with one of our consultants and check it against your price list on the spot. The consultant names your business in ChatGPT and puts the three questions to it; you check the prices and times it gives against your own price list line by line, and when it’s asked how to book, you see right there whether it can point to your booking page or just tells customers to ring. The same session also covers your website’s GEO audit score. The audit is free, and it looks at whether AI can understand your website.

Further reading