How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

When customers ask ChatGPT who to use, it names two or three businesses. Here is the practical work that decides whether yours is one of them, in six steps.

Step 1: find out what AI says about you today

Open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity and ask the questions your customers ask: "best [your service] in [your town]", "who should I use for [your service] near [your area]", "is [your business name] any good". Record whether you appear, what is said, and who is recommended instead. This is your baseline, and it is usually a shock.

Step 2: make your website answer questions, not just describe you

AI assistants lift from pages that answer questions directly. Rewrite your core service pages so each one plainly states what you do, who for, where, at what price, and why you can be trusted. Add an FAQ section answering the literal questions customers ask, in full sentences a model can quote.

Step 3: add structured data

Schema markup states your business facts in a form machines read natively: name, services, area served, pricing, reviews, FAQs. A page can look fine to a human and still be unreadable to a model deciding who to recommend. This is the single most commonly missing layer on small business websites.

Step 4: make every source agree about you

AI systems cross-check. Your website, Google Business Profile, directories and social profiles should state the same name, services and details everywhere. Every inconsistency costs the model confidence, and confidence is what recommendations are made of.

Step 5: give the model reasons to trust you

Publish content that demonstrates expertise: real answers to real problems in your field, written properly and attributed to your business. Models weight sources that visibly know their subject, which is what topical authority means in practice.

Step 6: keep your site open to AI crawlers

Check your robots.txt is not blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and their peers. Blocking AI crawlers makes a business invisible to the corresponding assistants, and plenty of sites do it without realising.

What to expect

Results build progressively, because each platform refreshes its knowledge of the web on its own schedule. Meaningful movement is usually visible within a structured three month campaign. And a note of honesty: nobody can promise what an AI platform will say. Anyone who guarantees you a specific AI answer is guessing. What you can control is being findable, understandable and credible, which is the entire game.

Read next

• Run the DIY AI visibility audit
• Schema markup, explained for business owners
• How to monitor what AI says about you