How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT

A growing number of people now ask an AI assistant for a recommendation before they ask Google for a list. “Find me a good plumber in Sheffield.” “Who does SEO for dental practices in Yorkshire?” The answer comes back as three named businesses and a sentence about each.

If you are not one of the three, you did not lose a ranking. You were never a candidate.

This is worth attention now because almost nobody local is doing it, so the field is open. Of the agencies we reviewed when planning this site, one had anything resembling AI search provision. The rest had not noticed.

How an assistant actually picks

Different systems work differently, but the shape is consistent. When asked to recommend a local business, an assistant will typically run a live web search, read a handful of results, and build an answer from what it can extract and cross-check.

Three things follow from that, and they are the whole strategy:

1. It has to be able to read your site. Not render it, not scroll it: extract facts from the HTML it receives.
2. It has to find the fact stated plainly. Assistants lift self-contained statements. They do not infer that you cover Rotherham because you mentioned it in a testimonial.
3. It prefers facts corroborated elsewhere. A claim on your own site is weaker than the same claim on your site, your Google Business Profile, and a directory that agrees with both.

Almost everything below is a consequence of one of those three.

1. Make the facts extractable

The most common failure we see is a site where the basic facts exist only inside images, inside a JavaScript-rendered widget, or implied across three paragraphs.

State these in plain text, on the page, in short declarative sentences:

• What you do, in the words customers use, not “bespoke solutions”, but “emergency boiler repair”
• Where you do it, naming the towns
• Your hours, phone number and address, as text
• Your prices, or at least a range
• How long you have been trading

That last one matters more than it looks. “Established 2016” is a fact an assistant can repeat. “Years of experience” is not.

2. Answer questions in one self-contained paragraph

This is the single change that moves the most for the least effort.

When an assistant needs a fact, it lifts a passage. A passage that only makes sense after reading the two paragraphs above it is much harder to lift than one that stands alone.

So write FAQ answers that begin by answering:

How long does local SEO take to work? Local SEO typically shows measurable movement within three to six months, with meaningful enquiry growth from month six onwards. Map pack results can move faster if your Google Business Profile has been neglected.

Not “Great question! It depends on a number of factors…”. That paragraph contains nothing to extract.

Three sentences minimum, and the first sentence should be usable on its own.

3. Add structured data, properly

Schema markup is how you hand a machine the facts rather than hoping it infers them. For a local business you need:

• LocalBusiness (or a specific subtype) with your name, address, phone, coordinates, hours and URL
• Service for each thing you sell
• FAQPage on any page with a real FAQ
• BreadcrumbList on every page below the homepage
• Person for named authors, linked to a real bio

One thing worth being firm about: do not add aggregateRating markup unless you have genuine, verifiable reviews displayed on the page. Self-serving rating markup on service pages is against Google’s guidelines and risks a manual action.

We hold 62 Google reviews at 4.9 and we still state it as text rather than marking it up, because the guideline is about where the reviews live, not whether they are real.

4. Publish an llms.txt

A plain text file at the root of your domain (/llms.txt) stating who you are, what you do, where you operate, your services and your price ranges, in short declarative sentences.

It is not a ranking factor and no assistant is obliged to read it. It costs about twenty minutes, it removes any ambiguity about your core facts, and ours is live if you want a template. Almost no regional business has one, which is exactly why it is worth having.

5. Get corroborated

An assistant is much more comfortable recommending a business whose details agree across several independent sources. Which means the unglamorous work still matters:

• Google Business Profile, complete, with correct categories, hours, service areas and photos
• Consistent name, address and phone number everywhere, character for character, including whether it is “Street” or “St”
• Reviews, in volume and recent. Ten reviews from 2021 read as a business that stopped
• Directories and trade bodies that list you accurately
• Being mentioned by other people: local press, suppliers, partners, a podcast

That last category is the closest thing AI search has to link building, and it is the hardest to fake.

6. Do not block the crawlers

Check robots.txt. Some sites (and some hosting platforms by default) block AI user agents including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended.

There is a fair argument for blocking them if you are a publisher whose content is the product. If you are a plumber who wants to be recommended, blocking them is self-defeating. Know which one you are, and make it a decision rather than a default.

7. Be findable in normal search first

There is no separate AI index. Assistants overwhelmingly search the ordinary web and read what comes back. If you are on page four of Google, you are not in the sample being read.

So AI visibility is not an alternative to SEO. It is SEO, plus habits of clarity and structure that also make the site better for people. If your site is not ranking at all, work through this first. The AI work will not compensate.

How to check where you stand

There is no Search Console for this yet, so do it by hand and write the answers down:

1. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI overview: “Who are the best [your service] in [your town]?”
2. Note whether you appear, and who does
3. Ask a follow-up: “Tell me about [your business name]”, and check whether what comes back is accurate
4. Repeat monthly

That second check catches something surprisingly common: being known but described wrongly, usually with an old address or a service you dropped years ago. That is a corroboration problem: find the stale listing, correct it, and the description follows.

Where this is going

Assume the share of enquiries that begin with an assistant rather than a search box keeps rising. The businesses that will be recommended are the ones that made their facts easy to read, easy to verify and consistent everywhere. Which is, unhelpfully for anyone hoping for a trick, mostly just doing the fundamentals properly and writing clearly.

We build this into campaigns as standard rather than selling it as an upgrade. Here is how we approach AI search optimisation, and here is what the campaigns cost.

If you want to know who else is working on this, we maintain lists of the best AEO experts to follow and the best SEO consultants in the world.