How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Google's AI

More of your customers now ask an AI tool who to call before they ever open Google. In a March 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults, 45% said they’d used an AI tool to find a local business in the past year (BrightLocal, March 2026). So it’s a fair question: when someone in your town asks ChatGPT for a good dentist, plumber or lawyer, why does it name the businesses it names, and what can you do about it?

I’ve spent 25 years getting businesses found, and the honest answer is less mysterious than the people selling “AI SEO” would like you to think. These tools mostly repeat what the rest of the internet already says about you. Here’s how that works, what you control, and how to check where you stand without fooling yourself.

How AI Answers Pick a Business

When you ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI a question about a local business, it usually doesn’t answer from memory. It runs searches in the background, reads a handful of pages, and writes an answer from what it found. Google says its AI Overviews and AI Mode may run “multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources” to build one answer (Google Search Central, read November 2026).

That has two consequences worth understanding.

First, the AI can only name you if it can find you and read about you. If your site is thin, your listings are half-filled and nobody else online mentions you, there’s nothing for it to repeat.

Second, the question your customer types gets broken into smaller questions. “Who’s the best emergency plumber near me?” turns into searches about emergency plumbing, about your town, about reviews and about hours. The businesses that show up across several of those smaller searches are the ones that end up in the answer.

Each tool searches a little differently:

• Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google’s own index, and Google says there are “no additional requirements” and no special optimizations needed to appear in them beyond being a page Google can find and show.
• Gemini leans on Google Search and Google Maps, which is why your Google Business Profile matters so much there.
• ChatGPT uses its own search crawler plus outside search providers, and for local answers it can draw on directory data. Yelp, for one, signed a deal to bring its reviews and business details into ChatGPT (MarTech, 2026).
• Claude, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot each search the web too, and Copilot is built on Bing.

You don’t need to master each one. The same handful of things feed all of them.

The Four Places They Read About You

Your Own Site

Your site is where an AI tool learns what you actually do. It needs to say, in plain words on the page, what services you offer, which towns you serve, your hours, how to reach you, and anything that sets you apart (emergency service, payment plans, languages spoken, the insurance you take). If that information only lives in a photo, a PDF or a pop-up, assume the AI can’t use it.

A page per service you want to be known for helps a lot. “We do it all” gives an AI nothing to quote. A page that explains your water heater replacement service, what it costs roughly, how fast you can come out and which neighborhoods you cover gives it a reason to name you when someone asks about water heaters.

Your Listings

Your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp and your industry’s own directories are where AI tools check the basic facts: your name, address, phone number, hours and categories. These need to match everywhere. If one listing says you close at 5 and another says 6, or one still has your old phone number, you look less trustworthy to software that’s trying to decide whether the facts are reliable.

In one large study of local searches, websites and listings together were the source of most of what AI tools cited, about 44% and 42% respectively (Yext, October 2025). Yext sells listings management, so weigh that accordingly, but the direction matches what we see.

Your Reviews

AI tools read reviews to decide whether you’re any good, and they read what the reviews say as well as the star count. A review that says “they came out at 10 p.m. on a Sunday and fixed our burst pipe” teaches the AI that you do emergency work on weekends. Fifty reviews that say “great service” teach it much less.

Other People’s Lists

When people ask for “the best” of anything, AI tools lean heavily on articles that rank or list businesses. Across 750 prompts asking for software, products and agencies, “best of” list articles made up 43.8% of the pages ChatGPT cited (Ahrefs, December 2025). That study wasn’t about local businesses, but local lists work the same way: the local paper’s “best of” issue, your chamber of commerce directory, a neighborhood blog’s roundup, your industry association’s member list.

Mentions matter more than links here. A big study of 75,000 brands found that how often a brand was mentioned around the web, and especially on YouTube, tracked with being named by AI far more closely than backlinks did (Ahrefs, December 2025). That’s a correlation, and nobody outside these companies can prove what causes what, but it’s the strongest signal anyone has measured.

What You Control, in Order

If I were starting from scratch with a local business, this is the order I’d work in. The first three cost nothing but time.

1. Fill out your Google Business Profile completely. Every field: categories, services, service areas, hours, holiday hours, photos, a description written for people. Then check Bing Places and Apple Business Connect, which feed Copilot and Siri, and make them match.
2. Fix your basic facts everywhere. Search your business name and phone number and correct every listing that’s wrong. Old addresses and old phone numbers are the most common problems we find.
3. Rewrite your site so it answers questions. One page per main service, one clear page about the area you serve, your prices or price ranges if you can share them, and a plain FAQ written from the questions customers actually ask you on the phone.
4. Ask every happy customer for a review, every week. Make it easy with a direct link. Don’t offer anything in exchange for a review, which Google’s rules forbid, and never buy or fake one: the FTC bans fake reviews, and they can get your profile suspended.
5. Get onto local lists honestly. Join your chamber and your industry association, apply for the local “best of” awards, sponsor a team, and ask partners you work with (suppliers, realtors, other trades) to mention you. Each of these is a real mention by someone else.
6. Show up on video. If you’re comfortable on camera, a few short videos answering common customer questions, posted to YouTube with your business name said out loud and written in the description, is one of the better bets you can make.

None of this is new, and that’s the point. The businesses AI tools recommend are mostly the businesses that were already doing the basics well.

Let the AI Tools Read Your Site

This one’s technical, and it catches people out. Some web hosts and security services now block AI crawlers by default. Cloudflare, a security service many hosts and site builders use, started blocking AI crawlers by default for new customers on July 1, 2025 (Cloudflare).

That can quietly take you out of AI answers. OpenAI says plainly that sites which block its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers” (OpenAI, read November 2026).

Ask whoever runs your site to confirm that these are allowed: Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (ChatGPT), Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User (Claude), and PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User (Perplexity). Whether to allow the crawlers that collect data for training future models, like GPTBot and ClaudeBot, is a separate choice. For a small business that wants to be known, I’d allow them, but blocking those won’t remove you from search answers.

How to Check Where You Stand, Honestly

Most people don’t know this: AI answers change every time you ask. In a study where about 600 volunteers ran the same 12 questions through ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI a combined 2,961 times, there was less than a 1 in 100 chance of getting the same list of brands twice, and about a 1 in 1,000 chance of getting the same list in the same order (SparkToro, January 2026).

So if you asked ChatGPT once, saw your name and relaxed, or asked once, didn’t see it and panicked, neither result meant much. Here’s a check that does:

1. Write down five questions your customers would really ask, in their words. “Who’s a good family dentist in Kirkland that takes Delta Dental?” is better than “best dentist.”
2. Ask each one in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google (look for the AI Overview or try AI Mode). If you can, add Perplexity and Claude.
3. Ask each question three times on each tool, in a fresh chat each time, and don’t stay signed into an account that knows who you are if you can avoid it.
4. Keep score. For each question, count how many of the runs named you, and write down which competitors were named and which sources the answer linked to.
5. Repeat it once a month, with the same questions, so you’re comparing like with like.

What you’re looking for is a share: “named in 4 of 15 runs” is a real measurement, and you can watch it change. The sources column is the useful part. If every answer cites the same local “best of” list or the same directory, that’s where you need to be.

Checking every month matters for a second reason: the tools keep changing. Google made 4,781 changes to Search in 2023 (Google, How Search Works), and the AI answers change how they pick businesses with each update. A business that was named in January can drop out by March without doing anything wrong, and the only way to know is to keep checking.

What Not to Pay For

There’s a lot of money being made right now selling fear about AI. A few things I’d skip.

Anyone who guarantees you’ll be recommended by ChatGPT. Given that the answers change from run to run, a guaranteed placement can’t exist. Ask how they’d measure it and you’ll usually get a screenshot of one lucky run.

An llms.txt file as the fix. It’s a proposed file that tells AI tools what’s on your site. Across 137,000 sites that had one, 97% of the files got no requests at all in May 2026 (Ahrefs, June 2026). It’s harmless, but it isn’t a reason to pay anyone.

Schema markup sold as “AI optimization.” Structured data is good practice for ordinary search results, and it’s worth having. But in a test of 1,885 pages that added it, there was no meaningful lift in AI citations (Ahrefs via Search Engine Journal, May 2026), and Google says no special markup is needed for its AI features.

Hundreds of near-identical pages. Some packages promise a page for every town and every service, with the town name swapped in. Google’s spam policy calls that doorway and scaled content abuse, and it now explicitly covers “attempting to manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search” (Google Search Central). A few real pages about the places you actually serve beat a few hundred fake ones.

Paid “AI directory” listings nobody reads. If you’ve never heard of a directory and can’t find it by searching for your industry and town, an AI tool probably hasn’t either.

If someone’s pitch is mostly about secret techniques, be wary. The work that moves AI answers looks a lot like the work that’s always brought in local customers, done steadily.

A 30-Day Plan

If you want a place to start, here’s a month of work an owner can do in about an hour a week, plus one longer evening at the start.

Do that for three months and compare your score from the first week with your score from the twelfth. That’s your real answer to whether it’s working, and it’ll tell you more than anybody’s sales deck, ours included.