How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Found on Google

To get your business recommended by ChatGPT and found on Google, give both of them the same clear facts about you, in the places they read. That means a page for every service you sell, structured data that says what each page is, a complete Google Business Profile, and the same name, address, and phone everywhere you're listed.

That's the work we do at 6AI. Here are the steps in the order we do them for clients. Most of them cost nothing but time.

Why Google and ChatGPT want the same things

ChatGPT doesn't keep a list of businesses to recommend. When someone asks it who to call, it usually searches the web, reads a handful of pages, and names the businesses those pages back up. Google's AI answers work much the same way, from Google's own results.

So the work that helps you rank also helps an assistant find you, but an assistant doesn't just repeat Google's top ten. The difference is the shortlist. A results page shows ten links, and an answer usually names two or three businesses. Being easy to quote, and being named on the pages it reads, decides which ones.

The eight steps

1. Write a page for every service you sell. An assistant can only cite a page that exists. A site that lists six services on one page usually loses to a competitor with a page for each.
2. Answer the question in the first two sentences. Say what you do, where, and for whom, in plain words, at the top of each page. Assistants quote sentences that make sense on their own, so write every sentence to survive being lifted out of its paragraph.
3. Add structured data. This is schema.org markup that tells a machine your business name, address, phone, services, and hours, so it doesn't have to guess from the layout. Google's Rich Results Test shows whether yours works.
4. Claim your Google Business Profile and fill in every field: the most specific category, a description, hours, phone, services, and photos. Then claim Bing Places for Business, which can import your Google profile in one step. Bing's index feeds Microsoft Copilot and is one of the sources behind ChatGPT's search.
5. Write your name, address, and phone the same way everywhere: your site, your Google and Bing listings, Yelp, LinkedIn, and every directory you're on. An assistant has to work out that all of those are the same business, and every difference makes that harder.
6. Get onto the lists people check before they hire. Search for what you sell in your city and look at what comes up: industry directories, review sites, and “top 10” roundups. Assistants build their recommendations from pages like those, so claim the free listings and ask the roundup authors to consider you.
7. Ask every customer for a review, on Google first. Reviews help you show up in Google's local results, and assistants often repeat what reviewers say when they describe a business. Ask right after the job is done, and reply to every review, good or bad.
8. Let AI crawlers in. Check your robots.txt for lines that block OAI-SearchBot, which ChatGPT's search uses, or PerplexityBot. GPTBot only collects training data, so blocking it doesn't keep you out of ChatGPT's answers. Most sites don't block any of them, but it takes a minute to confirm. A plain-text summary of your business at /llms.txt is a small extra for the crawlers that look for one.

What doesn't work

• Paying someone for a “ChatGPT ranking.” Nobody controls what an assistant says, and an answer has no ranks to sell.
• Publishing dozens of near-identical pages that swap one city name for another. Google treats them as spam, and an assistant finds nothing on them worth quoting.
• Changing your name, address, or phone in one place and not the others. It leaves Google and the assistants unsure which version is right.
• Stuffing keywords into a page. It reads badly to people, and it gives an assistant nothing clear to quote.

How to check whether ChatGPT recommends you

Write down three questions a customer would ask, like “Who should I hire for [what you do] in [your city]?” Ask each one three times in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI mode, in a new chat each time. Count how many of the nine runs in each one name you.

Answers change from run to run, so one check tells you little. Write the count down with the date. That's your baseline. Do the work, give the engines a few weeks to pick it up, and ask again.

It's the same protocol we use for clients. We report it as “named in N of 9 runs,” never as a rank, because an answer has no positions.

Questions we get

If you'd rather hand it off, that's what we do. Tell us what you sell and where, and we'll run the check on your business and send you the count.