How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?
The short answer
AI assistants name businesses they can confirm in several places at once: your website, your Google profile, your listings and your reviews. Make them all say the same clear thing, and answer real customer questions on your own site.
Test it first
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the question your customers ask, for example "Who's the best emergency plumber in [your town]?" Then ask "Are there complaints about [your business name]?" Write down who gets named and what is said about you.
Where AI looks
A 2026 BrightLocal study of AI answers found that about 93% of the sites cited were individual business websites, and Yelp appeared as a source in 80% of ChatGPT's answers. Your website and your listings both matter.
Five moves
- Use the same name, address and phone everywhere: your website, your Google profile and every listing.
- Answer real customer questions on your site. One question per heading, with a short, direct answer under it.
- Give each service and each town you serve its own page, and name the towns. "The greater metro area" tells an assistant nothing.
- Keep reviews coming from real customers, describing the real job in their own words. Never script them.
- Don't block the search crawlers. ChatGPT search uses a crawler called OAI-SearchBot; OpenAI says sites that opt out of it won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
Check your robots.txt in one step
Add /robots.txt to the end of your web address. If you see "Disallow" next to OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Bingbot or Googlebot, ask your web person to remove it. Blocking GPTBot is different: OpenAI uses it for training, not search.
