How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT
The short answer
Nobody controls what ChatGPT says, but you can improve your odds. Keep your Google Business Profile complete and accurate, earn recent reviews, make your website say plainly what you do and where, and keep your name, address and phone number identical across the sites that list you. Then test it by asking ChatGPT yourself.
By Reputant · Updated 2026-10-30 · 14 min read
What does it mean to be recommended by ChatGPT?
A customer types something like "who is a good dentist in Halifax?" into ChatGPT. It answers with a short list of names, sometimes with a line about each. If your business is on that list, you were recommended. If it is not, the customer never hears about you.
That is different from Google. A Google search shows ten results, a map and a lot of ads, and the customer picks. An assistant picks for them. The list is short, and the first names carry most of the weight.
People in the trade call the work of getting onto that list generative engine optimization, or GEO, and sometimes LLM SEO. Both mean the same thing here: making it more likely that an AI assistant names your business. Strip off the label and it is mostly the local work you may already be doing, with a few extra checks.
One honest limit up front. ChatGPT is not a form you fill in, and no company can pay or tweak its way onto the list with certainty. Anyone who promises a guaranteed spot is selling something. What follows is what tends to help, and how to check whether it is helping.
Do customers really ask ChatGPT for local businesses?
Yes, and the number grew fast. BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey found that 45% of consumers used an AI tool such as ChatGPT to find a local business recommendation in the past year, up from 6% the year before.
The same survey found that 42% of consumers already trust AI recommendations as much as they trust online reviews. A name that an assistant offers is starting to count the way a friend's tip or a strong review count.
Most of your customers still use Google, so this is an addition to your local search work, not a replacement for it. The point is that a second place now exists where a customer can decide before ever seeing your website.
How hard is it to get named by ChatGPT?
Harder than getting into Google's top three. SOCi, a software company for multi-location brands, published its 2026 Local Visibility Index in January 2026. It looked at more than 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands. ChatGPT recommended just 1.2% of those brand locations, against an average 35.9% appearance rate in Google's local 3-Pack.
That study covers large chains, not a single-shop owner, so do not read the percentages as your odds. It does show the shape of the problem: an assistant gives a short list, and most businesses are left off it.
The same SOCi release reports that locations recommended by ChatGPT average 4.3-star ratings. That is an average across the businesses it named, not a rule. It fits the common sense idea that an assistant is more comfortable naming a business that customers like.
Where does ChatGPT get its local answers?
Be careful with anyone who tells you exactly. ChatGPT can answer from two places: what it learned in training, and what it finds when it searches the web for your question. OpenAI says ChatGPT search can use outside search providers and partner content, and that it may use your approximate location to return local results.
OpenAI does not publish a list of which data sources feed a local business answer. You will read claims online that ChatGPT leans on Bing, or on Foursquare, for places. Those are guesses from outside observers, and this guide does not repeat them as fact. Treat them as unconfirmed.
What you can say safely is this. A search-backed answer is built from public pages about your business, so the more clear, consistent and recent public information exists about you, the more there is to build from. That points at the same places Google reads: your profile, your reviews, your website and the directories that list you.
Our guide on how ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity pick local businesses sorts what each company states from what outsiders infer, assistant by assistant.
How ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity pick local businesses
How do I check whether ChatGPT recommends my business?
Ask it the questions a customer would ask. Do it in a fresh chat with no history, and ideally with your own account signed out of anything that would tilt the answer. Use your real city, and write the way a customer talks, not the way a marketer does.
Copy these and swap in your business type and town. Run each one on ChatGPT, then again on Claude and Gemini, and write down what comes back.
The plain recommendation
Who is the best [business type] in [city, state]?
The near-me version
I need a [business type] near [neighborhood or landmark]. Who would you recommend?
A specific job
Who should I call for [specific job, such as an emergency tooth extraction or a water heater repair] in [city]?
Compared with a rival
Is [your business name] or [competitor name] better for [service] in [city]?
What it knows about you
What do you know about [your business name] in [city]? What do customers say about it?
Open to suggestions
What should I look for when choosing a [business type] in [city], and which ones meet that?
Answers change from one ask to the next, so run each prompt two or three times before you decide anything. One miss means little. Being absent every time is a signal.
What should I look for in the answer?
Do not stop at "was I named". The details tell you what to fix.
- Were you named at all, and in which position in the list?
- Did it recommend you, or only mention you in passing?
- Which competitors did it name, and what do they have that you lack, such as more reviews or a clearer website?
- Is what it says about you true? Wrong hours, an old address or a service you dropped all show up here.
- Does it cite sources? Where it shows links, those are the pages it leaned on.
Doing this for six prompts across three assistants by hand takes a while, and nothing is saved between sessions. AI visibility explains what to record so your results can be compared next month.
What should I fix first to get recommended by ChatGPT?
Start with the sources an assistant is most likely to read about you. This order puts the fastest, cheapest fixes first.
- Complete your Google Business Profile. Fill in your main category, services, hours, phone, website and a description of what you do and where. Fix anything that is out of date.
- Collect more recent reviews. Ask each customer after the job, and send the same request to everyone. Reviews give an assistant real sentences to draw on.
- Reply to your reviews. A reply shows the business is active and adds your own words about the service.
- Put the plain facts on your website. A page for each main service, with your town named, your hours, your phone number and an honest description of who you serve.
- Make your name, address and phone number identical everywhere. The business name on your profile, website, Yelp and other listing sites should match letter for letter.
- Claim and check the other places customers look. For many trades that means Yelp, and for restaurants and hotels, TripAdvisor and OpenTable. Remove duplicates.
- Test with the prompts above, wait a few weeks after you change something, and test again.
None of these is a trick, and none comes with a guarantee. They are the things a careful human would check before recommending you.
Do reviews really matter to ChatGPT?
Reviews are some of the most widely available public text about a local business, so it is reasonable to expect an assistant that searches the web to see them. No company has published exactly how it weighs them, so this is an inference, not a promise.
Quantity, recency and wording all give it something to work with. A business with a handful of reviews from three years ago gives an assistant very little. A business with fresh reviews that mention the work, the town and the staff gives it plenty.
You cannot buy or invent them. Google's review rules apply, and fake reviews can also break consumer protection law in the US and in Canada. Ask real customers for honest reviews and leave it there. This is general information, not legal advice.
What should my website say?
Write for a person who knows nothing about you and has ten seconds. If an assistant reads your site, it should be able to lift a clear sentence about you.
Say what you do, where you do it, who it is for, and how to reach you. "Family dentist serving Halifax and Dartmouth, open Saturdays, accepting new patients" is better than "excellence in smiles". The first can be repeated back to a customer. The second says nothing.
Add an About page with the real people and the real years in business, and a page for each service. Put your hours and phone number in text, not only in an image, so they can be read.
Why does my name and address need to match everywhere?
When an assistant finds three slightly different versions of your business, it has to guess which is right, and a guess can go against you. A change of suite number, an old phone number or "Smith & Sons" in one place and "Smith and Sons Plumbing" in another all add doubt.
Pick one exact version of your name, address and phone number and use it everywhere. Check your profile, your website footer, Yelp, Facebook and the main directories in your trade. Reputant can run a read-only citation check on Yelp, TripAdvisor and OpenTable, which shows how those listings read today.
Do I need special tricks for AI, like hidden text or special pages?
No. Be wary of any advice that sounds like a trick, such as hidden text, pages stuffed with the phrase "best plumber" or offers to submit you to ChatGPT. There is no submission form, and tricks that look like manipulation tend to age badly.
A better test is whether the thing would also help a customer. A clear page, accurate hours and an honest review reply do. Hidden text does not.
What should I not bother with?
A few things get sold as AI fixes and do little for a local business.
Do not pay a service that promises a spot in ChatGPT. Do not buy reviews or ask friends to write them, because fake reviews break Google's rules. Do not publish dozens of thin pages that repeat "best plumber in your town" with a different suburb each time. They read badly to a person and give an assistant nothing new.
Do not panic if ChatGPT names you once and misses you the next time. Answers are written fresh, so some variation is normal. What matters is how often you appear across several asks, and whether that rate moves after you make a real change.
What if I have more than one location or serve several towns?
Treat each location as its own business. An assistant asked about "dentist in Dartmouth" looks for something tied to Dartmouth, so each location needs its own profile, its own address and its own reviews. One page that lists every town in a paragraph tells it much less than a page per location.
If you travel to customers instead of having a shop, name the areas you serve on your website and in your profile, and be honest about the edges. A plumber who says "we cover Austin, Round Rock and Cedar Park" gives an assistant something concrete. A plumber who says "serving the greater area" does not.
Test each location separately with its own city in the prompt. A business can be named in one town and missing in the next, and the fix for each is usually local: that location's reviews, that location's profile.
What if ChatGPT gets facts about my business wrong?
It happens. An old phone number, a closed second location or a service you stopped offering can all show up in an answer. You cannot edit ChatGPT directly, so go to the likely source. Check your Google Business Profile, your website and the directory listings for the wrong detail, fix it, and ask again in a few weeks.
Write down the exact wording of the wrong answer before you change anything. That gives you something to compare against. If the same wrong fact keeps coming back after the sources are fixed, it may be coming from what the model learned in training, which only changes when the maker updates it. In that case keep the public sources clean and keep checking.
What can I do this week if I only have an hour?
Spend ten minutes asking the first three prompts above on ChatGPT and writing down who it names. Spend twenty minutes on your Google Business Profile: check the category, hours, phone number and description. Spend the rest sending a review request to the last five customers you served.
That small round covers the three things an assistant is most likely to see about you. Come back in a month and ask again.
How long until ChatGPT starts naming my business?
There is no fixed time. Changes to your profile or website can show up in search-backed answers in days or weeks, because they read live pages. What an assistant learned in training changes only when its maker updates the model, which you cannot predict.
Run the same prompts every few weeks, keep notes, and judge by the trend. Because answers vary, treat a single run as a snapshot, not a verdict.
What about Perplexity and Google AI Overviews?
Customers use them too, and the advice above applies to them as well. Reputant does not track either today. Its checks cover ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. You can still test the other two by hand with the same prompts.
Where should a busy owner start this week?
Run the six prompts above on ChatGPT and write down what you see. Then fix the first gap you find: usually an incomplete profile, too few recent reviews or a website that never names your town.
Repeat in a month. If you are named more often or higher, keep going. If not, look at who is named instead and see what they have that you do not. The local SEO basics in what local SEO is still do most of the lifting.