How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business?

How AI assistants pick a business

When someone asks ChatGPT "who installs X in Greenville?", it searches the web, reads a handful of pages, and names the businesses those pages describe most clearly. It looks at your website, your listings and reviews, and what other sites say about you. A business that is hard to read gets skipped, even if it is the best one in town.

A client found me this way. They asked ChatGPT for a local AI app auditor and it named me. I wrote up what I think made the difference. The steps below are the same ones I used.

The six fixes

1. Let the AI crawlers in. Check your robots.txt and any firewall or bot-protection settings. OpenAI's search crawler is called OAI-SearchBot. Blocking GPTBot (its training crawler) does not remove you from ChatGPT search, but blocking OAI-SearchBot does.

2. Get into Bing. ChatGPT's web search leans on Bing. Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, and claim your Bing Places listing. Most small businesses have never done this.

3. Give each service its own plain page. Each page should say, in the first two sentences: what the service is, who it is for, where you offer it, and what it costs or a price range. Then the details, and a short list of common questions with direct answers. AI assistants quote clear, early answers.

4. Put prices and policies in plain text. If your prices, service area or warranty only live in a PDF, an image or a phone call, an AI cannot repeat them. Write them on the page.

5. Earn reviews and mentions. Ask happy customers for a review that names the service and the town. Get listed in the local directories and associations for your industry. A mention in a local paper or a partner's website counts.

6. Test every month. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Mode and Claude the five questions your customers would ask. Note who gets named. Fix what is missing and ask again next month.

What does not work

• Paying someone to "rank you in ChatGPT". No one has access to that.
• Hundreds of thin pages. Google and the AI tools are getting better at ignoring pages that exist only to rank.
• Stuffing your town name everywhere. One clear local page beats twenty near-copies.

How NexAI helps

The AI visibility audit runs the real questions your customers ask across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Mode, checks whether the crawlers can read your site, and fixes the pages. It is from $500: $500 10-question visibility & crawler audit · $1,500 with Schema.org & plain-text page fixes.

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