How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

Most pages answering this question sell a service by implying control that nobody has. So, plainly: you cannot make ChatGPT recommend your business. There is no directory to join, no feed to submit, no field to fill in, and no advertising product that places a business inside an organic recommendation. Anyone promising a guaranteed AI recommendation is either confused about how these systems work or counting on you being confused.

What is true is more useful, and quite a lot less comfortable: ChatGPT's answer about local businesses is assembled from information that already exists about them. Some of that information you control. Most of it you do not, but you can influence it. The work is to make the true version of your business easy to find, easy to read and corroborated in enough places that it survives the trip into an answer — and then to check whether it did.

ChatGPT can answer a question about local businesses in two quite different ways, and confusing them is the reason most advice on this topic is unreliable.

This is the single most common own goal, and it is free to fix. Many sites block AI crawlers — sometimes deliberately during the 2023–24 wave of blanket blocking, often because a plugin, a host or a security product did it without anyone deciding. A site that blocks OpenAI's search crawler cannot be retrieved and quoted, no matter how good it is.

OpenAI runs separate crawlers for separate jobs, and this is the part people get wrong: blocking training does not have to mean blocking search.

Other assistants follow the same pattern of separating the jobs. Anthropic runs ClaudeBot for training, Claude-SearchBot for search indexing and Claude-User for user-initiated fetches. Perplexity runs PerplexityBot for indexing and Perplexity-User for fetches prompted by a specific question. Google separates Google-Extended, which governs AI training and grounding in some of its systems, from ordinary Search crawling.

So the configuration below is a legitimate position — present in search, absent from training — and it is a choice, not a default. Fetch your own robots.txt and find out which one you are currently making.

Google is the only major platform that has documented this clearly, and what it says is a useful corrective to a lot of paid advice.

Google states there are no additional technical requirements for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond ordinary Search eligibility: the page needs to be indexed, meet the usual technical requirements, and be eligible for snippets. It also notes that the snippet controls you already know — nosnippet, data-nosnippet and max-snippet — limit what its AI features can use, and that its AI features run multiple related searches rather than a single query.

Two practical consequences. First, if someone is selling you a special technical treatment to get into AI Overviews, the platform's own documentation contradicts them. Second, a max-snippet directive set years ago to protect content from being summarised is now also limiting what Google's AI can quote from you. That is worth checking.

Before anything can recommend your business, it has to be confident about what your business is. That sounds trivial. In practice it is where most local businesses are quietly losing.

A tree company might appear as “DEL Trees” on its site, “DEL Tree Service LLC” on its Google profile, “D.E.L. Landscaping — Tree Division” on a directory, with three phone numbers across the set and two different service areas. A person reconciles that in a second. A system deciding whether these are one business or three does not necessarily reconcile it at all — and a business it cannot resolve is a business it is unlikely to name.

What to reconcile, in the order that tends to matter:

Your website asserts. Everything else corroborates. A model's impression of your market is built from many independent sources describing the same businesses, and a business that exists only on its own domain has one source — the one with the most obvious motive.

This is usually the real difference when a competitor is named and you are not. Not a better website. A longer list of places that independently confirm they exist and do this work.

Where corroboration tends to come from, roughly in order of effort:

People talk to assistants differently from how they type into a search box. They give context, they describe a situation, and they ask for a judgement. “I have a maple that has lost a big limb over my driveway after the storm — is that an emergency, and what does removal usually run?”

Pages that answer that kind of question directly — stating what the work involves, what it typically costs, what affects the price, when it is urgent — are material an assistant can use. Pages of adjectives about commitment to excellence are not.

The test we use is simple: could a stranger read one page of your site and correctly answer a customer's question about your business? If not, neither can a machine.

Everything above is reasonable. None of it is proof. The only way to know whether any of it changed ChatGPT's behaviour towards your business is to have recorded what ChatGPT said before you started.

That means a fixed set of questions phrased the way your buyers speak, run repeatedly, across platforms, with every answer stored. Then the same questions again after the work, compared like for like. Change the questions between rounds and you have thrown away the comparison — which is, not coincidentally, how a lot of reporting in this field manages to look successful.

Expect the first measurement to be uncomfortable and expect it to be surprising in a specific way: the most common finding is not absence, it is inaccuracy. Assistants confidently describing service areas you left, services you dropped, or hours that changed two years ago.