How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

Ask ChatGPT for “a good emergency plumber in Tulsa” and you get a short list of names. There's no ad slot to buy and no form to submit. But the process behind that list is less mysterious than it looks, and most of the inputs are things a small business already controls.

What happens when someone asks

OpenAI's help centre describes the steps in fairly plain terms:

1. ChatGPT works out where the person is. It uses an approximate location from their IP address, or a precise one if they've turned on location sharing (it's off by default).
2. It rewrites the question into search queries. OpenAI's own example: “good restaurants near me” from someone in San Francisco becomes “top restaurants San Francisco”. It often runs several follow-up queries.
3. It sends those queries to search partners. OpenAI doesn't name them all, but the privacy policies it links to for its search providers are Microsoft's and Shopify's. For local questions it may also share the general location with “trusted third-party providers” of business listings.
4. It reads what comes back and writes the answer, with citations and, on mobile, sometimes a map. For restaurants it can show live tables from OpenTable, Resy or Yelp.

The part that matters for you: ChatGPT can only recommend a business it finds in those results and can read. Its own guidance for site owners is one sentence long. To be eligible, allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl the site and make sure your host or CDN lets OpenAI's published IP addresses through. Placement, it says, is not guaranteed.

The answers change every time, and that's normal

BrightLocal ran 200,000 local prompts through ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews in 2026. ChatGPT named about four businesses per answer on average. When the same prompt was run again, only 23% of the list was the same. A business that appeared once came back in about half of later runs.

So “ChatGPT didn't mention me when I tried” tells you very little. Ask the same question five times, from your city, and count how often you show up. That's the number worth improving.

1. Make sure it can read your site at all

This is rarely robots.txt. In our scan of 101 US small-business sites, only 3 blocked any AI crawler in robots.txt, and only one blocked a bot that powers AI answers. The more common problem was a firewall: 8 of the 101 sites returned an HTTP 403 to our automated requests, even when we retried with a normal browser user agent. We can't see whether those firewalls also turn away OpenAI's crawler, but a security plugin or CDN rule set to “block bots” is the usual reason a site goes missing.

The AI Crawler Checker reads your robots.txt for OAI-SearchBot and the other answer bots. If it says you're allowed but you still never appear, ask your host whether bot protection is on.

2. Be findable in Bing

OpenAI points to Microsoft's privacy statement for its search providers, so Bing is very likely in the mix. A site that Bing hasn't indexed starts at a disadvantage. Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, and claim your Bing Places listing. When you publish or change a page, ping it with IndexNow so Bing picks it up within hours rather than weeks.

3. Say what you do, where, in plain text

ChatGPT turns a question into a query like “emergency plumber Tulsa”. Your homepage should contain those words as a normal sentence: what you do, which town or area, and for whom. A slogan like “Comfort you can count on” gives the search step nothing to match.

Then add the same facts as structured data. In our scan, 30 of the 93 homepages we could read had no Organization or LocalBusiness schema at all, and only 35 used an industry type such as Dentist, LegalService or Plumber. The Schema Generator writes it for you in a couple of minutes.

4. Be on the sites ChatGPT reads about you

Your own website isn't the only source. In BrightLocal's data, the most-cited sources across ChatGPT and Google's AI features were Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, Tripadvisor, OpenTable, MapQuest and the Better Business Bureau, plus trade directories for each industry. BrightLocal also found ChatGPT's overlap with Google's AI answers was only about 20%, which it put down to ChatGPT's reliance on Yelp and Bing.

In practice: claim and complete your Yelp and Bing Places listings, keep your name, address and phone number identical everywhere, and get on the one or two directories that matter in your trade. Restaurants should check their OpenTable, Resy or Yelp reservations are switched on, since that's where ChatGPT gets bookable tables.

5. Earn reviews that say what you did

Reviews are part of the text ChatGPT reads. “Great service!” helps a little. “Fixed our burst pipe at 11pm on a Sunday in Brookside” tells a model what you do, when and where. When you ask customers for a review, ask them to mention the job.

6. Have a page for the question

People ask assistants longer questions than they type into Google: “how much does a crown cost in Boise”, “which divorce lawyers in Mesa offer a free consultation”. If you have a page that answers that directly, with prices or ranges and the conditions that change them, you give the model something to quote. Our industry guides for dentists, law firms, plumbers, electricians, auto repair shops and more list the questions we see most often in each trade.

How to tell if it's working

• Referral traffic. OpenAI says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to links, so visits show up in Google Analytics. Here's how to set up the report.
• Repeat checks. Run the same three or four customer questions every month and note how often you're named. The AI Visibility Quick Scan does this for you and shows which competitors come up instead.

If you'd rather have someone go through all six for your business, that's what our AI visibility audit covers, with a fix list in priority order.

Sources

• OpenAI Help Center: searching the web with ChatGPT
• OpenAI: overview of OpenAI crawlers
• BrightLocal: what 200k local AI searches tell us (Sep 2026)
• GeoLumen: State of AI Search for Small Business 2026