How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT | How-to Guide

What ChatGPT and other AI assistants read before they recommend a local business, and the practical steps that make yours easier to name: crawler access, plain facts on your site, consistent listings, reviews and being mentioned elsewhere.

There is no form to submit and no way to pay ChatGPT to recommend you. When it answers "who's a good plumber in Leeds?" with web search, it reads pages and listings it can find, then summarises. Your job is to make the facts about your business easy to find, easy to read and consistent wherever they appear.

How the answer gets made

For questions about current, local things, ChatGPT search looks things up on the web, using search results and its own crawler (OAI-SearchBot). It then picks sources that clearly answer the question and names businesses those sources describe. Other assistants work in similar ways: Perplexity has PerplexityBot, Microsoft Copilot uses Bing, and Google's AI features use Google's index.

1. Let the crawlers in

Check your robots.txt. Blocking OAI-SearchBot keeps your pages out of ChatGPT search answers. Note the difference: GPTBot collects data for training, while OAI-SearchBot is used for search. You can block one and allow the other. Also make sure Bingbot and Googlebot are allowed, and verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools as well as Google Search Console.

2. Make sure crawlers get the words, not an empty page

Some sites only show their text after JavaScript runs in a browser. Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so they see a blank page. View your page source (not the rendered page) and check that your headings and paragraphs are there.

3. Write the facts down plainly

Assistants match requests against stated facts. "Emergency plumber, 24 hours, covering Leeds and Bradford, fixed call-out fee of £X, Gas Safe registered" is matchable. "Quality service you can trust" is not. Put on your site, in sentences:

  • what you do and the specific services, in the words customers use
  • where you work
  • who you are best for (families, offices, first-time buyers)
  • prices or price ranges, hours, and how to book
  • what makes you different, stated as a fact you can back up

4. Answer real questions on your own pages

Pages that answer one question directly, near the top, are easy to quote: "How much does end of lease cleaning cost in Canberra?" followed by a straight answer. A steady stream of such pages, written from your real knowledge, gives assistants more reasons to use you as a source.

5. Be consistent across listings

Name, address, phone, hours and categories should match on your site, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp and the directories in your trade. Conflicting details make you a less confident answer.

6. Reviews and mentions

Assistants lean on what others say: reviews, local news, trade association lists, "best of" articles. Ask every happy customer for a review, and look for genuine mentions such as a supplier's case study, a local award or a community sponsorship page.

How to check

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot the questions your customers would ask, with search on, and look at which sources they cite. Those cited sites show you where to be listed and what kind of page they prefer.

Answering one real customer question a week is the steady work that makes a business easy to cite. SEO God Mode does that drafting for We.Inc sites and leaves the final say with you.

Frequently asked questions

Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?

No. ChatGPT's search answers are built from web sources it finds. You influence them by being clearly described on your own site, in listings and in reviews.

Which crawler does ChatGPT search use?

OAI-SearchBot. GPTBot is a separate crawler used for training data. Blocking OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt keeps your pages out of ChatGPT search results.

Why does ChatGPT not see my website text?

Often because the site only renders its text with JavaScript, which many AI crawlers do not run. Check your page source to see what a crawler receives.

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