How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and Google's AI

Why AI recommendations matter

When people want an accountant, a wedding photographer or a design studio, many now ask an AI assistant a full question and get a short answer that names a handful of businesses.

If your business is one of those names, that's a warm introduction. If it isn't, you may never know the conversation happened. Most of what helps is the same good practice that has always helped people find you: a clear, honest website and a good reputation elsewhere.

To be clear from the start: nobody can guarantee that an AI assistant will recommend your business, and anyone promising that is overselling. What you can do is make it easy for these tools to find you and get your details right.

How AI assistants find businesses

Each assistant works differently and the details change often, but at the time of writing:

• Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google's search index, the same one behind ordinary Google results. If Google can't crawl and index your pages, they're unlikely to appear.
• ChatGPT search uses third-party search providers alongside OpenAI's own crawler, OAI-SearchBot.
• Perplexity runs its own crawler, PerplexityBot, to find pages for its answers.

Assistants may also draw on what their models learned in training, which can be out of date. Live search is how fresh information reaches an answer, so the steps below are about making your business easy to read and verify.

Step 1: Let search crawlers in

Your website's robots.txt file tells crawlers which parts of your site they may visit. One overly broad rule can quietly block the very tools you want to be found by. Make sure it allows the search crawlers that matter:

• Googlebot, for Google Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode.
• Bingbot, for Bing and the services that draw on it.
• OAI-SearchBot, for ChatGPT search.
• PerplexityBot, for Perplexity.

Search crawlers and training crawlers are different

Some crawlers collect pages for search; others collect content to train AI models. OpenAI, for example, uses OAI-SearchBot for search and GPTBot for training, and you can allow or block each one separately. So you can stay visible in AI search while opting out of training, or allow both. Just don't block search crawlers by accident, and check each company's current documentation, as names and roles change.

Step 2: Make key content readable without JavaScript

Many modern websites build their pages in the browser using JavaScript. Google can usually handle that, but many AI crawlers don't run JavaScript at all, so if your key content only appears after a script runs, they may see very little.

A quick test: open a page, choose your browser's "view page source" option, and search for a sentence from your main content. If it's there, crawlers can read it. If not, ask your web developer about making key content part of the page itself.

Step 3: State the facts plainly

AI assistants summarise what they read, so make the summary easy to get right. Somewhere clear on your website, in plain text, say:

• Who you are: your business name, exactly as you use it everywhere else.
• What you do: your services or products, in the words your customers use.
• Where you work: your town, region or country, and how far you'll travel or ship.
• How to contact you: email, phone or a contact form, plus your address if customers visit.

Keep these details the same on your website, your Google Business Profile, directories and social profiles. Conflicting information makes it harder for any system to be confident about who you are.

Step 4: One page per service, and real answers

A single page listing everything you do gives an assistant little to work with. A page for each service, explaining what it is, who it's for and how it works, gives it something specific to match to a specific question.

Then answer the questions your customers really ask. Turn the common ones into FAQs and the bigger ones into guides like this one. Put the answer first, then the detail: plain, direct answers are easier for people and machines alike.

Step 5: Add honest structured data

Structured data is a small block of code that describes your page in a way machines can read reliably. Useful types for most small businesses include:

• Organization: your name, logo, contact details and social profiles.
• Service: what each service is and where you offer it.
• FAQPage: questions and answers that appear on the page.
• BreadcrumbList: where a page sits within your site.

Only mark up genuine facts that visitors can also see on the page. Describing reviews you don't have or services you don't offer goes against Google's guidelines and can do more harm than good. Structured data won't guarantee a mention either: it simply helps machines understand what's already there.

Step 6: Get mentioned on other trusted sites

Assistants don't only read your website. A business that's mentioned consistently on reputable sites is easier to trust than one that only describes itself. Look for:

• Directories: relevant industry directories, local listings and trade bodies.
• Press: local news, trade publications and industry blogs.
• Partners: suppliers and collaborators happy to list or link to you.
• Reviews: genuine reviews on the platforms your customers use. Never buy or fake them.

Link to your social profiles from your website, and back to your website from each profile, so it's clear they all belong to the same business.

Step 7: Set up the free webmaster tools

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are both free, and both show whether those search engines can find and index your pages. Set up each one, verify your website and submit your sitemap: a file listing the pages you want found.

It's also worth looking at IndexNow, which lets you tell Bing straight away when you add or update a page. At the time of writing it's supported by Bing and some other search engines, but not Google.

Step 8: Treat llms.txt as optional

You may have heard of llms.txt, a proposed file that gives AI tools a plain-text summary of your site and links to your key pages. It's quick to add and does no harm, but it's experimental, not an official standard, and not a ranking factor. Add one if you like, but do the steps above first.

Step 9: Measure by asking

There's no complete, reliable way to see every time an AI assistant mentions your business. The most practical way to measure is to ask.

1. Write down the questions your customers might ask, such as "who's a good [your service] near [your town]?"
2. Ask each one in ChatGPT, Google and Perplexity, plus any other assistant your customers use.
3. Note whether you're mentioned, what's said about you, which sources are cited and which other businesses appear.
4. Repeat every month or so and keep a simple log.

Answers vary from day to day, so look for trends rather than single answers. The cited sources are useful too: they show which sites the assistants trust in your field, and where a mention might be worth earning.

Your checklist

None of this is a trick, and none of it guarantees a recommendation. But it's the same work that makes your business easier to find, understand and trust for humans and machines alike. If your website is getting in the way, our web design service covers SEO and AI search visibility as well as the design itself.