How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT

To get your business recommended by ChatGPT, make it easy for the AI to be sure about you. That means clear, quotable answers about what you do and where on your own website, the same business facts everywhere they appear, a site AI crawlers can read, and a presence on the websites the AI already trusts for your market. The same work gets you named by Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity.

Below is how AI assistants decide which businesses to name, and the fixes that move you into the answer. Most of it you can start this month.

How AI assistants choose which businesses to name

When someone asks ChatGPT “who’s a good roofer in Kingston?”, it does not pick from a directory of paying customers. For questions about local businesses, the AI tools search the web, read a handful of pages, and write a short answer from what those pages agree on. Google AI Mode and AI Overviews work from Google’s index. Copilot works from Bing’s. ChatGPT search draws on third-party search providers, Bing among them, alongside its own crawler. Perplexity runs its own search and shows its sources.

So the AI is looking for two things:

Pages that answer the question. A page that says plainly “we are a roofing company in Kingston upon Thames, covering KT1 to KT6, flat and pitched roofs, free quotes within 48 hours” is easy to quote. A page that says “excellence in every project” is not.
Agreement between sources. If your website, your Google Business Profile, Checkatrade, Yell and a local news story all say the same thing about you, the AI can repeat it with confidence. If they disagree, or you only appear in one place, it tends to name someone it is surer about.

It usually names a handful of businesses, not ten. That is the difference from a page of search results, and why it matters to be one of them.

1. Make your facts consistent everywhere

AI tools cross-check. Your business name, address, phone number, services, areas covered and opening hours should be identical on:

your website, in the footer and on the contact page;
your Google Business Profile;
your Bing Places listing;
the directories that matter in your sector (Checkatrade, Yell, Trustpilot, carehome.co.uk, Doctify and so on);
your structured data (the LocalBusiness schema on your site).

Old addresses, a mobile number on one listing and a landline on another, or a trading name that differs from the one on your site all chip away at the AI’s confidence. Our NAP consistency checklist walks through the clean-up step by step.

2. Get onto the sources the AI already cites

Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity the question your customers ask, and look at the sources it links. You will usually see the same kinds of site come up: a sector directory, a review site, a local “best of” article, a trade association’s member list, a comparison page. Those are the pages the AI trusts for your market.

If you are not on them, work through the list:

claim and complete your profile on each directory it cites;
ask happy customers for reviews on the review sites it cites, not only Google;
join the trade body or local business group whose member list keeps appearing;
if a local article or roundup is cited, contact the writer with something genuinely useful, such as a new service, a local project or an expert comment.

This is slower than editing your own site, but it is often what tips the answer.

3. Write answer-first pages

AI tools lift short, direct answers. For each main service, the page should open with a sentence or two that answers the question a customer would ask, before anything else:

what you do, and for whom;
where you work, by town or postcode;
roughly what it costs, or how pricing works;
how quickly you can help, and how to book.

Then add a short FAQ with the questions customers actually ask you on the phone, each answered in two or three sentences. Write it the way you would say it. “Yes, we cover Twickenham, Teddington and Hampton, and we can usually visit within two working days” is exactly the kind of line an AI will quote.

Mark the page up with structured data (LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage) so the facts are machine-readable as well as human-readable.

4. Let AI crawlers in, and add llms.txt

Check your robots.txt file (yourwebsite.co.uk/robots.txt). Some sites block AI crawlers without the owner knowing, often through a security plugin or a hosting default. The ones to know:

OAI-SearchBot is what ChatGPT uses to find pages for its search answers. Block it and ChatGPT search is less likely to show your site.
GPTBot collects pages for training OpenAI’s models. You can block this one without affecting ChatGPT search.
PerplexityBot is Perplexity’s crawler.
Bingbot feeds Bing, and through it Copilot.
Google-Extended controls whether Google uses your pages to train Gemini. It does not take you out of Google Search or AI Overviews, which use the normal Googlebot.

Also check that your important pages show their text without needing JavaScript to run. Some AI crawlers do not run scripts, so content that only appears after the page loads may never be read.

llms.txt is a short text file at yourwebsite.co.uk/llms.txt that lists your most important pages with a one-line description of each, in plain Markdown. It is a proposed standard, not one the big AI companies have committed to reading, so treat it as cheap insurance rather than a fix. It takes half an hour to write.

5. Don’t ignore Bing

Most small businesses have never logged in to Bing Webmaster Tools. Copilot is built on Bing’s index, and ChatGPT search leans on it too, so if Bing cannot see your site properly, two of the five main AI tools are working from a gap.

Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools. You can import it from Google Search Console in a couple of clicks.
Submit your sitemap.
Check the indexing and SEO reports for pages Bing has not picked up.
Claim your Bing Places listing and make it match your Google Business Profile.

6. Reviews and listings

Reviews are one of the few places the AI can read what other people think of you. A steady flow of recent reviews on Google and on the review sites in your sector, with replies from you, gives the AI something to repeat. Reviews that mention the service and the town (“they fixed our boiler in Whitton the same day”) are more useful than “great service”, but never script or incentivise them: ask, and let customers say it their way.

7. Keep doing the classic SEO

Google AI Mode and AI Overviews build on Google’s normal results, so the basics still count: a fast site, a page per service, local pages for the areas you cover, and links from local and sector websites. AI SEO sits on top of that, not instead of it. Our SEO service covers the classic side.

How to check where you stand

The quickest check costs nothing:

Write down five questions a customer might ask before they hire you, in their words. “Who’s the best [service] in [town]?”, “Can anyone [do the job] this week near [postcode]?”, “Which [service] in [area] takes [specific case]?”
Ask each question in ChatGPT, Google (in AI Mode), Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity.
For each answer, note whether you are named, whether your website is linked, who is named instead, and which websites the answer links to.
Repeat next month. AI answers change from week to week, so one check is a snapshot, not a verdict.

If you would rather we did it, we run a free AI visibility check: we ask the AI tools the questions your customers ask and show you who they recommend. As part of our AI SEO services, we run that check every week across all five tools and fix what is keeping you out of the answer.

Glossary: GEO, AEO and LLM SEO

The names are new and overlap. In practice they describe the same job.

AI SEO. Getting your business named and your website cited in the answers AI tools give. The most common term.
GEO (generative engine optimisation, or optimization). The same thing, named after “generative engines” such as ChatGPT and Gemini that write an answer rather than list links.
AEO (answer engine optimisation). The same aim, from the angle of “answer engines”. The term is older and also covers featured snippets and voice assistants.
LLM SEO. Optimising for large language models (LLMs), the technology behind ChatGPT, Gemini and the rest.
AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google’s AI answers. AI Overviews sit at the top of normal results; AI Mode is a separate, conversational search.
Citation. A link or source the AI shows alongside its answer. Being named is good; being named and cited sends the customer to your site.
llms.txt. A proposed file that lists a website’s key pages for AI tools to read.

FAQs

How do I rank in ChatGPT?

There is no ranking list to climb. ChatGPT names the businesses it can be most sure about from the pages it reads. Make your facts consistent everywhere, write pages that answer customers’ questions directly, let OAI-SearchBot crawl your site, get listed on the sites ChatGPT cites for your market, and set up Bing Webmaster Tools.

Is SEO for ChatGPT different from SEO for Google?

They overlap heavily. Good Google SEO helps with Google AI Mode and AI Overviews and often with the other tools too. The extra work for ChatGPT and the rest is consistency of facts across the web, answer-first copy, AI crawler access, Bing, and being present on the specific sources the AI tools cite.

How long does it take to get recommended by AI tools?

Fixes on your own site and listings can show within weeks, because the AI tools read the web as it is now. Getting onto the third-party sites the AI trusts takes longer, often a few months. Check monthly rather than daily, because answers vary from one day to the next.

Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?

Not into the answer itself. Some AI tools now show labelled adverts, but the businesses named in the answer come from what the AI reads on the web, which is why the work is about your website, your listings and the sites that mention you.

What to do next

Run the five-question check above, or ask us for a free AI visibility check and we will show you who the AI tools recommend in your market, and why.