How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

By Carson Poore Last updated: Oct 9, 2026

Make your business easy to find and easy to trust in the places these tools read: a complete Google Business Profile, steady recent reviews, the same name and details on every listing, a site that Bing and Google have both indexed, and pages that answer customer questions in the first two sentences. Nobody can guarantee a recommendation. That includes us. Don’t get us wrong, though. You can stack the odds.

Here at CPC, we aren’t afraid of a hot take, so here’s ours: AI search is mostly old-fashioned housekeeping wearing a new jacket. Almost none of it is new. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews mostly reward the same housekeeping that gets you found on Google. They just punish skipped steps harder, because they name two or three businesses instead of showing you ten.

Are customers really asking ChatGPT who to hire?

Yes, and the jump was fast. In BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey, 45% of US consumers said they’d used AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier.

Getting named is hard, though. SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index tracked hundreds of thousands of locations and found ChatGPT recommended about 1.2% of them, while the same locations showed up in Google’s local 3-pack 35.9% of the time. Ranking on Google didn’t carry over automatically.

So how should you feel about that? This is worth an afternoon of your attention, not a panic. The owners getting named are mostly the ones who already did the boring work well.

Where does ChatGPT get its answers about local businesses?

From the open web, read much the way Google reads it. BrightLocal studied close to 2 million citations in local AI answers from ChatGPT and Google’s AI tools. Businesses’ own websites made up 42% of citations as a group. Google Business Profile, at 28.5%, was the largest single platform. Yelp, Facebook, Tripadvisor, and industry directories followed.

So when someone in Fishers asks ChatGPT for a good HVAC company, the answer is stitched together from profiles, reviews, directory listings, and a few company websites. If those sources disagree about you, or barely mention you... you’re easy to leave out.

Two more things matter here. First, Bing. When Microsoft made Bing the default search behind ChatGPT in 2023, Bing’s index became one of the doors into ChatGPT’s answers. Plenty of small-business sites have never been submitted to it. Second, the answers move around. In that same BrightLocal study, repeat searches for the same thing shared only 20–33% of their results on average. One test tells you very little.

The six levers, and a 10-minute check for each

Grab your phone and a coffee. Here’s the whole list on one screen, and you can knock out most of it this week.

Start with your Google profile and your reviews

These are the fastest wins and the biggest sources, so start here. Fill every field Google offers, pick the most specific category, and add real photos of real jobs. Then ask every happy customer for a review, by text, right when the work wraps up.

Ratings count. SOCi found locations ChatGPT recommended averaged 4.3 stars. You can’t fake your way there, and buying reviews breaks Google’s rules. But you can make asking a habit. Our article on why businesses don’t show up on Google walks through the profile fixes step by step.

Make every listing say the same thing

Search your phone number in quotes. You’ll probably find an old address on Yelp, a different business name on Facebook, or a duplicate listing from a previous owner. Pick one exact version of your name, address, and phone, and correct every listing to match. Then claim the directories your industry actually uses: Angi and Houzz for trades, OpenTable for restaurants, Avvo for lawyers.

Honestly, this part is boring. Do it anyway. It’s the gap we see most often, and it costs nothing to close.

Is your site in Bing?

Set up Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console in your own name, and submit your sitemap to both. It takes about 10 minutes. Bing will even import your Google Search Console setup if you have one. If a page isn’t in either index, you’re counting on someone else’s listing to tell your story.

Write pages that answer, with numbers

AI tools lift passages, not whole pages. The passage they lift is usually the one that answers the question right away. Researchers from Princeton and partner universities tested this in their generative engine optimization study (published at KDD 2024). Adding statistics, quotations, and cited sources raised a page’s visibility in AI answers by up to 40% in their tests. Keyword stuffing did little or nothing.

For a local business, that means a page per main service that opens with what it costs, where you work, and how long it takes. Picture a line like “Furnace replacement in Carmel and Westfield usually runs $4,500 to $9,000 and takes one day,” only with your real numbers. That’s quotable. “Quality comfort solutions since 1998” is not. It’s not about sounding impressive, it’s about being easy to quote.

Keep the important pages current

Ahrefs analyzed 17 million citations and found pages cited by AI assistants were 25.7% fresher on average than pages in regular search results. Put a visible “last updated” date on your key pages, and mean it. Change the prices when they change. Add the new service area. Changing the date without changing the page fools nobody for long.

What about schema, llms.txt, and “AI SEO” tools?

Here’s where we’ll be candid, because a lot of money changes hands on this stuff.

Schema markup is code that hands machines your business name, hours, and service area in a tidy format. You’ll see vendor claims that it multiplies AI citations. Those numbers are unverified. When Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added schema against thousands of similar pages that didn’t, citations in ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode barely moved. We still add schema for clients. It’s cheap and it helps search engines get your basic details right. We just won’t pretend it’s the reason anyone gets recommended.

An llms.txt file is a short plain-text guide to your site meant for AI crawlers. Ahrefs looked at sites that publish one and found 97% of llms.txt files got zero requests in May 2026. No major AI platform has committed to reading it. If your web person can add one in 10 minutes, fine. Don’t pay extra for it.

Tools that promise to “rank you in ChatGPT” deserve the same question we’d ask about a guaranteed Google ranking: guaranteed for which question, asked by whom, how many times? Given how much the answers shuffle between searches, a single screenshot proves nothing.

In our book, most owners should finish their Google profile before spending a dollar on anything labeled AI search.

How do you know if any of this is working?

Ask the tools yourself, on a schedule. That’s your one thing to start this week. Write down five questions your customers would really type, like “best roofer in Noblesville” or “who does same-day AC repair in Indianapolis.” Once a month, ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google, three times apiece. Note whether you’re named, who is named instead, and which page or listing gets cited.

Expect slow movement. Profile and listing fixes can show up within a few weeks. New pages take a few months. AI answers change on their own schedule, since each tool re-reads the web when it decides to. The competitor names in your log are useful too. Look up where they’re listed and you aren’t, and close that gap.

Rather have somebody in your corner on this? Our SEO and AI search work covers the site side: speed, Bing and Google indexing, answer-first pages, and a monthly prompt test with the results in plain English. Local SEO covers the profile, reviews, and listings. Most local businesses need both, and they run inside one retainer.

What else do owners ask about AI recommendations?