How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business

You cannot make an assistant recommend you. You can change what it reads about you, which is the only lever that has ever existed. Here is the work, in the order it pays.

Start with the uncomfortable part. There is no submission form, no listing to buy, and no setting inside ChatGPT that puts your business into an answer. Anyone selling you a guaranteed placement is selling you something they do not control.

What you can control is the raw material. An assistant answering “who is a good electrician near me” is assembling that answer from things other people wrote: your Google Business Profile, your website, the text of your reviews, directories, and any mention of you anywhere else. Improve the raw material and you change the odds. That is the whole game, and it is more winnable than it sounds, because most of your competitors have not touched it.

Step 1. Find out where you actually stand

Almost nobody has done this. Before you change anything, spend twenty minutes finding out what assistants currently say about you, because otherwise you will have no idea whether any of the work below did anything.

Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI mode. Ask each one the same five questions. Start a fresh chat for every question so an earlier answer cannot influence the next one.

• Who is a good [your trade] in [your town]?
• I need [your most urgent service] in [your town] today. Who should I call?
• What should I look for when choosing a [your trade] in [your town], and who is worth contacting?
• Roughly what does [your most common job] cost in [your town], and who does it?
• Tell me about [your exact business name]. What do they do, what do people say about them, and what do they not do?

Paste every answer into a document, whole, not summarised. Write the date next to it. Five questions across three assistants is fifteen answers, and that is your starting position.

The fifth question is the one that pays. It shows you what the internet currently believes about your business, in one paragraph, written by something with no reason to flatter you. Most owners find at least one fact in it that is wrong, out of date, or lifted from a directory they had forgotten about.

Step 2. Understand why it names some businesses and not others

An assistant needs three things before it will put your name in an answer. Almost every failure traces back to one of them.

1. It has to know you exist, from facts that agree

   Your name, address or service area, phone, hours and services have to match everywhere they appear. When two sources disagree, an assistant hedges, and hedging means it names somebody else instead.

2. It has to be able to match you to the need

   The assistant is matching a described problem to a described service. If your site says “bespoke property solutions” and the customer says “blocked drain”, there is nothing to connect.

3. Somebody other than you has to say it too

   Your own website claiming you are the best in town is marketing. Reviews, directories and third party mentions are evidence that survives a second opinion. This is usually the thing separating the businesses that get named from the ones that do not.

Step 3. How to optimize for ChatGPT search

This is where most of the winnable work sits, and it is unglamorous. Four things, roughly in order of return.

Let the crawler in

ChatGPT surfaces websites through OpenAI’s own crawler, OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI states that sites opted out of it will not appear in ChatGPT search answers. Check your robots.txt allows it, and check your host or CDN is not blocking OpenAI’s published address ranges either. This takes five minutes and it is the one item on this page that can silently cancel everything else.

Answer first, explain second

Web copy traditionally warms up. Assistants extract. Put the direct answer in the first one or two sentences under each heading, then explain underneath.

Here is the test. Delete everything on the page except the first two sentences of each section. Does it still answer the question? If not, restructure until it does.

Say the specific things nobody else will say

Vague claims cannot be quoted, because there is nothing to lift. “We respond fast” is unquotable. “We answer within five minutes in working hours and text back automatically outside them” is a sentence a model can lift word for word.

Most service websites leave out exactly the facts an assistant needs in order to recommend them. Put these in plain language on the page.

Write a real question and answer section

Cover the ten questions you get on every call, written as plain headings in the words customers use. Skip FAQ schema markup. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026 and removed the documentation the following month, so the markup now buys you nothing. The plain text still works.

Step 4. How to show up in AI search results beyond ChatGPT

ChatGPT is one assistant. The corroboration work below is what moves all of them at once, and it is the part most businesses skip because it happens off their own website.

• Keep reviews current and specific. Google builds its review summary from reviews in the last twelve months, so it is the recent text being read, not the star average. A review that names the job and the outcome can be summarised. “Great service, thanks” cannot.
• Reply to reviews with specifics rather than thanks. Your replies are part of what gets read, and they are in your own voice.
• Claim Bing Places. It is free, it relaunched in October 2025, and Bing is a separate index rather than a copy of Google’s, so it is genuinely a second source.
• Claim Foursquare. Its places data is now an open dataset under an Apache 2.0 licence, distributed well beyond Foursquare itself, so an accurate record there travels further than you would expect.
• List on the two or three directories that actually rank for your trade plus your town. Search it and see which ones appear. Ignore every other one.
• Get one genuine third party mention: a supplier’s installer list, a trade register, a chamber page, local press.
• Add LocalBusiness schema to your site carrying the same facts as everywhere else, then confirm it with Google’s Rich Results Test.

What does not work

• Buying a bundle of a hundred directory listings. Two or three that rank do the whole job, and bulk submissions look like exactly what they are.
• Writing your customers’ reviews for them, or tying any reward to a review being positive. Ask for the fact, not the verdict.
• Seeding questions in your Google Business Profile from second accounts. Google prohibits content posted from multiple accounts at one person’s request. Put the answer in your business description instead, where you control the wording anyway.
• Asking the model which page it used. A system asked after the fact will produce a plausible answer whether or not it read one. Use the sources it actually displays, and record no citation when it displays none.
• Reacting to a single bad answer. These systems are non deterministic. The same question can return a different answer an hour later.

How to know it worked

Re-run the same fifteen questions once a month and score each answer. Two points if it names you and describes you accurately, one if it names you but vaguely or with a wrong fact, zero if it does not name you at all. Fifteen answers puts the ceiling at thirty.

Nobody publishes a benchmark score for this, so anyone quoting you one has invented it. The number to beat is your own from last month, and the direction across three months matters far more than any single run.

Expect things to move in this order. The description of your business gets accurate first, because you control that material directly. Then you start getting named on the questions you should own. Then, eventually, enquiries arrive mentioning things you never advertised, and nothing in your analytics will ever explain where they came from. That last one is what success actually looks like here, and it is exactly why the score sheet matters.