Guide

How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

By Mark Troester · Updated October 2026

How AI assistants decide who to recommend

There's no directory you can sign up for and no button that puts you in ChatGPT. When someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, it combines what it already learned about businesses with a live search of the web. For local questions it leans heavily on map listings and reviews.

It then names the few businesses it can describe with the most confidence. That's why a business with a clear website and lots of specific reviews often gets named over a bigger competitor with a vague website.

The exact methods differ between ChatGPT, Google, Perplexity, and others, and they change often. The steps below work across all of them, because they're about being clear and credible, not about gaming one system.

Step 1: Find out where you stand

Before changing anything, see what AI says today. Open ChatGPT, Google (look for the AI Overview or AI Mode), and Perplexity, and ask 10 to 20 questions the way a real customer would:

• "Who's the best [your service] in [your town]?"
• "I need [a specific job]. Who should I call near [town]?"
• "Is [your business name] any good?"

Write down who gets named, how often you appear, and what's said about you. Watch for wrong details like old hours, services you don't offer, or a closed location.

Step 2: Make your website easy to describe

AI tools read your website to understand what you do. Help them:

• Open your homepage with one plain sentence: what you do, who you serve, and where. "Family-owned heating and air company serving Ashe and Watauga counties since 1998."
• Give each main service its own page, with real detail: what's included, who it's for, and typical timing or price ranges.
• List the towns or areas you serve in plain text, not only on a map image.
• Answer real customer questions in a short FAQ, in the words customers use.
• Keep important facts in text, not buried in images or PDFs.

Step 3: Make your listings match everywhere

AI cross-checks your details across many sources. When your name, phone number, hours, and services match everywhere, it trusts them more. Start with these:

• Google Business Profile, the most important one for local questions. See our Google Business Profile guide.
• Bing Places and Apple Business Connect.
• Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, and the directories that matter in your industry.

Step 4: Earn reviews that say what you're good at

AI often repeats what reviewers say. "Great service!" helps a little. "They replaced our furnace the same day in the middle of a snowstorm" helps a lot, because it tells AI exactly when to recommend you.

Ask happy customers to mention the job they hired you for and their town. Reply to reviews, good and bad. Never buy reviews or write your own. It breaks platform rules and can get your listing penalized.

Step 5: Get mentioned on other sites

What others say about you carries more weight than what you say about yourself. Good sources for a small business include:

• Local news stories, chamber of commerce and tourism listings
• Trade associations and certification directories
• Suppliers' "find a dealer" or "certified installer" pages
• Local "best of" lists, community sites, and podcasts

Step 6: Check again every month

AI answers change. Re-ask your list of questions monthly and note what moved. Improvements usually show up over weeks to months, not days, so measure the trend rather than any single answer.

What doesn't work

• Stuffing keywords into your business name or pages.
• Publishing dozens of thin, AI-written pages.
• Fake or paid reviews.
• Anyone selling "guaranteed ChatGPT placement." No one can guarantee what an AI tool will say.