How to get your local business recommended by ChatGPT and other AI assistants
You cannot buy a recommendation. Assistants recommend the businesses they can find, read and verify. Seven steps, a simple test, and what not to pay for.
Rating Matters · Updated
You cannot buy or switch on a ChatGPT recommendation. AI assistants build their answers from what they can find and trust about you: your website, your Google and other business listings, your reviews, and what other sites say about you. The work is to make those four sources clear, consistent and readable for AI crawlers. Answers also change from one conversation to the next, so measure how often you show up, not a fixed position.
How AI assistants find a local business
- ChatGPT uses web search for current questions. OpenAI's crawler OAI-SearchBot is what surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features.
- Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google's own index. Google says there are no additional requirements and no special optimisations: a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet.
- Perplexity, Copilot and others work in a similar way: they search, read a handful of pages and listings, and summarise.
So the base is ordinary visibility. A business that search engines cannot find or understand will not be recommended by an assistant either.
Seven things that make you easier to recommend
- Say plainly what you do, where, and for whom. In text, at the top of your homepage: “Family dentist in Zürich Oerlikon, open Saturdays, new patients welcome.” Assistants cannot recommend what they have to guess.
- Answer the questions customers ask. Prices or price ranges, opening hours, areas you serve, how to book, what makes you different. Direct answers are what assistants quote.
- Keep your facts identical everywhere. Name, address, phone and hours on your website, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect and the directories of your trade. Not every assistant relies on Google.
- Let the crawlers in. Check that your robots.txt does not block OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI recommends allowing it if you want your site to appear in ChatGPT search. GPTBot, which collects training data, is a separate crawler and can be set independently.
- Earn reviews that describe specifics. A review that names the service and what went well gives people and assistants something concrete. Ask every customer, never script reviews and never buy them.
- Get mentioned by others. Local press, trade associations, suppliers, partner pages and relevant directories. Independent mentions are how anyone checks that you are who you say you are.
- Keep structured data accurate. LocalBusiness markup with the same name, address and hours as the visible page. Google says you do not need special markup or new machine-readable files for its AI features, so treat this as hygiene, not a trick.
How to test your own visibility
- Write down five questions a real customer would ask, for example “Who is a good physiotherapist for runners in Washington DC?” or “Where can I get a phone screen fixed today near Bukit Bintang?”
- Ask each one in ChatGPT, Google (AI Mode or AI Overviews), Perplexity and Copilot.
- Note three things: do you appear, is the information about you correct, and who appears instead.
- Fix what is wrong at the source. Wrong hours in an answer usually come from a wrong listing somewhere.
- Repeat once a month. One answer is a sample, not a ranking.
If competitors appear and you do not, open the sources the assistant cites. They show you which pages and listings it trusts for your trade and area.
What not to pay for
- A guaranteed place in ChatGPT answers. Nobody outside the AI companies controls what an assistant says.
- Secret “AI files” or special markup. Google says you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in its AI features.
- Hundreds of machine-written articles. Pages that say nothing new do not make a business more trustworthy.
What does pay off is the unglamorous work: a clear website, accurate listings, genuine reviews and a few real mentions. It is the same work that helps you on Google Maps, described in our local SEO checklist.
Common questions
Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?
You cannot pay to be included in the answer itself. Where assistants show advertising, it is separate from the answer and labelled.
How long does it take until AI assistants mention my business?
There is no fixed timeline. Corrections on your website and listings can be picked up within days or weeks, depending on how often they are crawled. Reviews and independent mentions take longer to build.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
It does no harm, and we keep one ourselves, but do not expect it to change results on its own. Google says no special files are needed for its AI features.
Does my Google rating matter for AI answers?
Assistants often cite ratings and reviews from business listings when they recommend places, and people check them before they call. A strong, recent review profile helps in both cases.
Sources
Want to know what AI assistants say about you?
Send us your business name. We ask the main assistants the questions your customers ask, and tell you where you appear, what is wrong and what to fix first.