How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business (and how to check if it does)

Search is changing. People still use Google, but many now type a full question into ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot and read a short answer. For a "who should I hire?" question, the answer names a handful of businesses. If yours is not one of them, the person asking never learns you exist.

Here is the honest position. There is no form to fill in and no fee that gets you listed in ChatGPT's answers. Companies that promise to "get you recommended" are guessing. The assistants decide what to say, they draw on different sources, and they change how they work without notice.

What you can do is work on the things they appear to rely on: clear descriptions of what you do, accurate and consistent business details, real reviews, and mentions from other places. The first step is to see where you stand today.

Replace the brackets with your own details. Mix three kinds of question:

• Discovery: the customer does not know you yet ("best X near me"). This shows whether you come up at all.
• Research: the customer is learning ("what should I look for"). This shows whether the assistant uses your content to explain your field.
• Reputation and comparison: the customer already knows your name ("is X good", "X vs Y"). This shows what the assistant knows about you.

A question about your own name tests something different from a discovery question. The first shows what the assistant knows. The second shows whether you are in the running. Do both.

For a local business, add your town or area to the discovery questions, and ask a version without it. Does ChatGPT recommend local businesses? It can, and the answer often depends on the place you name and the tools the assistant is using at that moment, so test both ways.

Assistants do not always give the same answer twice, so one run proves little.

1. Pick three assistants: for example ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
2. Open a private window or log out, so the answer is not shaped by your history.
3. Ask each question two or three times, in fresh chats.
4. Record each answer in a table: date, assistant, question, whether you were named, and what it said.
5. Mark what is wrong: old addresses, services you do not offer, a different company with a similar name.
6. Note which sources it cites, when the assistant shows them. Those are the places that matter most to fix.

Treat the first run as a baseline. Repeat once a month and compare. A free check like this takes an afternoon. Our free AI visibility check does the same across the main assistants if you want a faster read.

It is rarely a mystery once you look. Open the pages of the competitors who are named and compare them with yours.

Look for what they say plainly that you do not. A clear description of the service, the area they cover, who it is for. Look at their listings and reviews. Are their details identical everywhere? Do their reviews describe specific work? Are they mentioned in directories or articles in your trade?

Then look at how you appear. Missing pages, vague wording, an old address on one directory and a new one on another, or a handful of one-line reviews all make you harder to describe with confidence.

You are not trying to copy a competitor. You are trying to remove the reasons a machine would hesitate to name you.

Start with the places that describe you: your website, your listings and your reviews. If the acronyms are new, our guide to SEO vs AEO vs GEO explains them.

If you are not named

Look at your website and your profiles. Does a page clearly say what you do, where and for whom? Are you listed on the directories customers use in your trade? Are there reviews with real detail?

If details are wrong

Find the source that holds the wrong information. It might be an old directory listing, an outdated page on your own site or another company with a similar name. Correct the source, not the assistant.

If you are named but not linked

Check that the page that answers the question is plain, readable text and not locked inside images or scripts, and that it can be crawled.

If competitors are named and you are not

Use the comparison from the last section, and fix the gaps you find one at a time.

Run the same questions on the same day each month and keep the table. Add a note for anything you changed, such as a rewritten page, a corrected listing or a new batch of reviews, so that later you can see what moved.

Change one or two things at a time. If you change ten at once, you will not know what worked. Check once more after any major change to your website or listings.

Expect slow, uneven movement. The assistants change, answers vary, and some improvements take weeks to show. Judge progress by trends across several checks, not by a single day.