How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

What happens when someone asks an AI who's best

When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Gemini something like "who's the best HVAC company near me", the assistant usually runs a web search, reads a handful of pages, and writes a short answer that names a few businesses. It is not ranking ten blue links. It is picking names it can back up with what it just read.

So the question is never "how do I rank higher in ChatGPT". It is: when the assistant searches and reads, does it find you, can it understand what you are and where you work, and do other sources agree?

1. Make sure AI crawlers can read your site

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If it blocks GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, those companies' crawlers are told to stay out. Some website builders and security plugins add these blocks without asking. Remove them unless you have a reason to keep them.

Then check the basics a crawler needs: the site is on HTTPS, the main pages are reachable without a login or a cookie wall, and the important text is in the page itself rather than only inside images.

2. State the facts in a form a machine can parse

Add LocalBusiness structured data to your homepage: your exact business name, address or service area, phone number, opening hours and the services you offer. This is the same information a person reads on your contact page, written in a format software reads without guessing.

Use one name everywhere. If your website says "Summit Air", your Google Business Profile says "Summit Air Systems LLC" and Yelp says "Summit Heating", an engine has to guess whether those are the same business. Make them match.

3. Be described by sources that aren't you

Assistants are more willing to recommend a business when independent sources say the same things the business says about itself. In practice that means a complete Google Business Profile, listings on the directories that matter in your industry, genuine reviews, and mentions in local news, trade associations or "best of" roundups.

You cannot write these yourself, but you can make them easy: ask happy customers for reviews, claim and complete your listings, and keep every detail consistent with your website.

4. Publish pages that answer buyer questions directly

Write down the questions buyers actually ask before they hire someone like you: "how much does a new furnace cost", "repair or replace", "who does emergency plumbing on weekends in Auburn". Give each important question its own page, and answer it in the first two or three sentences before going into detail.

An assistant that searches for that question finds a page that answers it plainly, and a page that answers plainly is easy to quote. A homepage that says "quality service since 1998" answers nothing.

5. Measure it, because it changes

Answers are not fixed. They change as engines re-crawl, as competitors publish, and as reviews come in. Ask the engines your buyers' real questions every week or two and write down who was named, in what position, and which pages the engine read to decide. That last part tells you what to fix: if every answer is built from a directory you are missing from, that directory is your next job.

You can run one question now with our free check. It asks an engine that searches the live web and shows you the answer and the sources it used.