Oliver Zeman
How to Get Your Business Found on ChatGPT
AI assistants recommend businesses they can understand and verify. Here's what that means in practice, and the five things to fix first.
Ask ChatGPT to recommend a business in your industry. Go ahead: open it and type "best [what you do] for [who you serve]."
If you're not in the answer, this post is for you.
Why do AI recommendations matter now?
Because your customers already use them. People ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews the same questions they used to type into a search bar, except the questions are longer, more specific, and end in a recommendation instead of ten blue links. One answer, a few names. Either you're one of them or you're invisible.
The good news: most businesses haven't done anything about this yet. Early effort still stands out.
How does ChatGPT decide who to recommend?
AI assistants don't take payments for placement, and nobody controls their answers, not even the companies that build them. They recommend businesses they can understand and verify from public sources: your website, your business profiles, review platforms, directories, and articles that mention you.
That means the work is less mysterious than it sounds. You're not gaming a model. You're making your business legible.
What should you fix first?
Five things, in order of impact:
- Say plainly what you do. One sentence, on your homepage, that a machine could quote: who you are, what you sell, who it's for. If your homepage leads with "Excellence in every detail," an AI has nothing to work with.
- Answer real questions on real pages. Every question customers ask you on calls deserves a page or FAQ entry that answers it directly, in the first sentence, not after three paragraphs of wind-up.
- Keep your information consistent everywhere. Your name, services, and details should match across your site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, and directories. Contradictions make you unverifiable, and unverifiable businesses don't get recommended.
- Add structured data. Schema.org markup (Organization, Service, FAQPage) tells machines exactly what your pages mean. It's invisible to visitors and heavy-lifting for AI crawlers.
- Don't block the crawlers. Check your robots.txt. If it blocks GPTBot, PerplexityBot, or ClaudeBot, AI assistants can't read your site at all.
How long does it take?
Weeks to months, not days. AI systems re-crawl and update on their own schedules. In our experience the pattern is: fix the fundamentals, publish genuinely useful answers, then watch mentions start appearing over one to three months. Anyone promising a guaranteed citation next week is selling something they don't control.
Can you do this yourself?
Much of it, yes. The list above is a real starting point, not a teaser. Where an agency earns its fee is the monitoring (tracking which prompts mention you and which sources get cited, month over month) and the discipline of working the fixes in the right order.
If you'd rather see where you stand before deciding anything, book a free 20-minute call. We'll check how your business shows up in AI answers before we talk.