How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

Ask ChatGPT for “the best accountant in Adelaide” or “a good packaging designer for a food brand” and it names a handful of businesses. Some of them won’t be the best. They’ll be the easiest for the AI to find, understand and trust. That’s the game, and it’s winnable.

How ChatGPT decides who to name

ChatGPT draws on two things. What it learned in training, which you can only shape slowly. And what it finds when it searches the web live — which it does for most questions about current, local or buying decisions. You can influence that second part directly, starting this week.

The same is true of Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google’s own guidance, updated in July 2026, puts it bluntly: optimising for generative AI search “is still SEO”. The businesses that get named are the ones that did the basics properly.

Step 1 — Let the AI crawlers in

OpenAI is clear: sites that block its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Check your robots.txt file and make sure OAI-SearchBot is allowed.

GPTBot is a different crawler — it collects content for training future models. You can block GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot. Those are two separate decisions.

Then check what sits in front of your site. Most business websites now sit behind a firewall or content delivery service, and many of them added “block AI bots” settings in the past two years — sometimes switched on by default. They work silently: your site looks perfect to you, while the crawlers that feed AI answers are turned away at the door.

We found two of these on our own site this year:

• An AI-bot blocking switch. It sent an error back to every AI crawler — OpenAI’s, Perplexity’s, Anthropic’s and others — on every page, even the sitemap that exists to guide them. To a person in a browser, nothing looked wrong.
• A “managed” robots.txt. The service quietly added its own rules to the top of our robots.txt as the file was delivered, telling the same AI crawlers to stay away. The file in our code said “welcome”; the file crawlers actually received said “keep out”.

Neither showed up in our code, so no amount of reviewing the website would have found them. Here is how to check yours:

1. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser. That is the version crawlers see. Look for OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot followed by “Disallow: /”. If there are rules you did not write, something is adding them.
2. Ask whoever manages your domain, firewall or hosting to check the bot-protection settings for anything named “AI bots”, “AI crawlers” or “AI scrapers”, and for a managed or automatic robots.txt.
3. Decide crawler by crawler. You can keep training crawlers like GPTBot blocked and still let the search crawlers through. Blocking everything by default also blocks the visibility you want.
4. Check again after any change to your hosting, firewall or security plan — a new default can switch the block back on.

A robots.txt file that says “welcome” means nothing if the firewall says “no”.

Step 2 — Be findable in search engines first

AI answers that search the web need your pages indexed somewhere first. Register your site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools — OpenAI says ChatGPT search uses third-party search providers alongside its own crawler, and many businesses have never looked at Bing.

Fix the boring things: pages that load fast, one clear page per service, no important text locked inside images, and a sitemap that lists every page you want found.

Step 3 — Say what you do the same way everywhere

AI tools build a picture of your business from every place you appear: your website, your Google Business Profile, directories, social profiles and articles that mention you. When those sources disagree — different services, an old address, a name spelt three ways — the picture blurs, and a blurred business is easy to leave out.

Write one plain sentence that says what you do, where, and for whom. Use it on your homepage, your Google Business Profile and every listing. Then make each service page answer the question first, in the opening paragraph, before any sales talk.

The AI can only recommend what it can describe.

Step 4 — Earn reviews and real mentions

This is where local businesses win or lose. BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey found that 45% of people now use ChatGPT and other AI tools for local recommendations, up from 6% the year before. Over the same period Google’s share of local discovery fell from 83% to 71%. The shift is real, and it rewards proof.

Ask every happy customer for a Google review, and make it easy with a direct link. Reply to reviews, good and bad. Get listed — correctly — in the directories your industry uses. Aim for genuine mentions: a local news story, an industry association, a supplier’s case study, a podcast.

What doesn’t count: fake reviews, paid mentions on spam sites, or a swarm of copy-pasted press releases. Google’s guidance specifically warns against inauthentic mentions, and AI tools are getting better at ignoring them.

Step 5 — Publish the answers your buyers want

AI tools quote pages that answer questions directly. Look at what your customers ask before they buy — on the phone, in emails, in sales meetings — and answer each one on your website:

• How much does it cost, and what changes the price?
• How long does it take?
• How do you compare with the alternatives?
• What happens if something goes wrong?

Google calls this “non-commodity content” — your own experience and opinions, not a rewrite of what everyone else already says. A page that only your business could have written is a page worth quoting.

What doesn’t work

A whole industry now sells AI-search shortcuts. Most of them are a waste of money.

• llms.txt files. Google says its search ignores them. Publishing one does no harm, but it is not a ranking lever.
• Special “AI schema”. Google says there is no special markup for generative AI search. Normal structured data still helps search engines understand your pages — that’s all.
• Chopping content into chunks for AI. Google says there’s no need to break content into tiny pieces for AI. Write for people.
• Guaranteed placements. Nobody controls what ChatGPT says. Anyone promising a spot is selling hope.

How to check where you stand

Open ChatGPT and ask the questions your buyers ask: “best [your service] in [your city]”, “[your business] reviews”, “[your business] vs [competitor]”. Write down who gets named and what sources the answer cites. Do the same in Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Mode.

Then check the Generative AI performance report in Google Search Console. Repeat both every month. The goal isn’t one lucky mention — it’s becoming the business every AI tool can describe accurately, because the whole web agrees on who you are.