How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

You search for your own trade in your town and a competitor comes up in ChatGPT, not you. ChatGPT names the businesses it has found something worth quoting from: a clear answer to a real customer question, on a page it can read. Give it that, and you give yourself the best chance of being one of the names it mentions.

How does ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?

When someone asks ChatGPT for a local business, it turns that question into several searches, reads the pages it finds and names the ones with a direct, quotable answer near the top. OpenAI says ChatGPT "typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries", and the answer is built from pages on the open web, some of which can be you.

Your page has to be readable by ChatGPT’s crawler, OAI-SearchBot: OpenAI says sites that opt out of it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers". An analysis of 18,012 ChatGPT citations found that 44.2% of all citations come from the first 30% of text, so the answer needs to be near the top.

What does ChatGPT need to find on my website?

It looks for four things: a direct answer early in the page, clear headings, facts with named sources, and signs that a real business is behind the words. Before any of that, your site must let AI search crawlers in.

In 2026, researchers examined 21,143 citations across ChatGPT, Google’s AI answers and Perplexity. The pages with most influence on the answer were longer, more clearly structured, and richer in definitions and numbers. The table below sets out each thing ChatGPT looks for and what you can do about it.

What ChatGPT looks for	What that means in practice
A direct answer	Answer the reader’s question in the first three sentences
A clear structure	Use headings that say exactly what each section covers
Facts with sources	Include at least one number with a named source and a year
A real business	Complete your Google Business Profile and collect honest reviews
An open door	Make sure your site lets OAI-SearchBot in

What ChatGPT looks for, and what to do about each one

You can’t control what the AI says, but you can control what there is for it to find.

Does my Google Business Profile help ChatGPT recommend me?

Yes: when a 2026 study checked 1,355 business locations in three countries, the Google Business Profile was the most cited source in Google’s AI answers, and Yelp appeared in 80% of ChatGPT’s local answers; every study on that page of the book comes from a company that sells tools in this field, so treat the exact figures with care. Google’s own guide to AI search says a profile can help a business appear in its AI responses.

Reviews feed directly into what AI can quote: Google writes a short summary of what customers say about a business, and each summary is based on reviews from the past year and updated regularly to reflect recent opinions. Ask customers for an honest review, and never offer anything in return: Google’s UK help page calls that "fake engagement".

Will ChatGPT recommend me every time once I do this?

No, and anyone who says otherwise is not being straight with you. In a volunteer study published in January 2026, SparkToro, which sells audience research software, found that AI tools gave the same list of recommendations in fewer than one in a hundred tries; the author describes his team as not professional researchers, and his partner works at Gumshoe, which tracks AI visibility. That study had 600 volunteers run 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode 2,961 times, and was not peer reviewed.

OpenAI’s own help page states that "Placement is not guaranteed." The names change every time you ask, so check again each month and watch whether yours keeps coming back.

How do I know where I stand today before I change anything?

The ten-minute test on page 19 of the guide is your starting line. Write the question a real customer would ask, ask it in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google (all have a free version), note which businesses appear and whether yours is one of them, check whether what it says about you is accurate and up to date, and date the result so you can measure progress later. Ask the AI about your own business before you change anything, because what it says today tells you exactly where to start.

What the guide covers

"Does AI Show Your Business to Customers?" (2027 Edition) is the step-by-step method I use for paying clients, set out so you can use it yourself. The ten-minute test is in chapter 1, page 19. Chapter 2, from page 22, covers how AI decides who to mention and how to make sure it can read your site. Chapter 4, from page 42, sets out the eight parts of an article that AI can quote, with the answer-first rule at its centre. Chapter 7, from page 82, covers your Google Business Profile, your reviews and everything else the world can see of you: the places AI checks to tell whether a business is real.

The guide also includes a prompt library (Bonus A), ready-made customer questions for ten industries (Bonus B), and printable worksheets including an article template and a twelve-month scorecard (Bonus C). Chapter 1 is free to read in full at theaisearchbook.com/read-chapter-1/.