How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

A customer opens ChatGPT and types: "Who's a good family dentist in Round Rock?" or "Best place for a birthday cake near downtown Tampa?" A few businesses get named. Yours either is one of them or it isn't.

Owners ask us how to be one of them. Nobody outside OpenAI knows the exact formula, and anyone who claims to is guessing. But a lot is known, from OpenAI's own documentation, from Google's, and from the citation study we ran in September. This checklist sticks to that.

How assistants pick businesses, as far as anyone can show

OpenAI says any public website can appear in ChatGPT search, provided it doesn't block OAI-SearchBot. It also says product results are chosen independently and aren't ads. That's everything official.

Our study adds one pattern that matters for owners. Assistants and Google rarely cite the same pages, but they agree a lot on which companies are worth naming: between 34% and 54% of the companies an assistant cited also ranked in Google's top ten for the same question. The page an assistant links may be a directory, a review site or a forum thread. The company it names tends to be one the rest of the web already recognizes.

So the job is to make your business easy to recognize, everywhere a machine might look.

The checklist

Make your website readable

• Don't block the crawlers that fetch pages for answers. OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, Claude-SearchBot for Claude, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, Googlebot for Google's AI Overviews. Your web person can check robots.txt in two minutes, or run the free crawler check.
• Put your text in the page. Some website builders load everything with JavaScript. Many AI crawlers don't run it, so they see a blank page. More on that here.
• Say what you do and where. A plain sentence near the top of your homepage: "Family dentist in Round Rock, Texas, open Saturdays." Assistants quote plain sentences.

Be the same business everywhere

• One name, one phone number, one address (or service area) on your site, your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook and industry directories. Mixed versions make it harder for any system to tell they're the same company. How to clean that up.
• Complete your Google Business Profile. Google tells site owners to keep it current for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Categories, hours, services, photos, a description written for customers.

Give assistants something to say

• Reviews with detail. "They fixed our leak the same day and showed us photos of the damage" says more than five stars. Ask customers to mention the service and the town. Our notes on Google reviews apply to any trade.
• Answer the questions customers ask before calling. Prices or price ranges, how long it takes, whether you take insurance, what areas you cover. One page per real question beats a long FAQ nobody reads.
• Get mentioned by other sites. Local news, your chamber of commerce, suppliers, "best of" lists in your town. Brand mentions covers how.

Check what ChatGPT says about you today

Ask it the way a customer would, without your business name: "best [what you do] in [your town]." Then ask it directly: "What do you know about [your business name] in [your town]?"

Do this in a fresh chat with memory off, three times. In our study, ChatGPT's cited sources changed almost completely between runs of the same question, so one answer proves nothing either way. If you're named in two of three, you're in the pool. If you're never named and a competitor always is, look at what the competitor has that you don't: more reviews, a better profile, a page answering the exact question.

What we wouldn't spend money on

• Paying for "AI listings" or "ChatGPT placement." There's no documented way to buy one.
• An llms.txt file as a fix for local visibility. Google said in 2025 that no AI system uses it. Details.
• Rewriting your whole site "for AI." The basics above are the same basics that help on Google Maps and search, and that's no coincidence.

Next steps

Run the three test questions above this week and write down who gets named. Then work through the checklist in order: crawler access first, then consistency, then reviews and pages.

If you'd like it done for you, our AI search optimization service covers the access fixes, the listing cleanup, the pages, and monthly tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google, for $1,000 a month with no contract. Local home service businesses can also start with the plans on our pricing page, and there are pages on how the work runs for roofing companies and home remodelers.