How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business
When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation in your category, it either mentions you or it does not - and most businesses have never checked. You cannot buy the placement, but the signals it works from are buildable.
First, see what AI currently says about you
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot the questions your customers would: best [your service] in [your city], [your product] recommendations, is [your business] legit. Note whether you appear, what is claimed about you, and which competitors are named. This baseline takes ten minutes and is usually eye-opening.
Make your site readable to AI at all
AI assistants that browse rely on crawlers that mostly do not run JavaScript. If your content only exists after scripts execute, you are invisible to them regardless of quality. Check your raw page source contains your actual content - and that GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and friends are not blocked in robots.txt (plenty of sites blocked them in 2023 and forgot).
Say plainly what you do and where
AI recommendation is retrieval plus summarisation: systems recommend businesses they can confidently describe. A homepage that says Empowering tomorrow’s solutions gives a model nothing. One that says Emergency plumber serving Parramatta, licensed, 24/7, fixed-price quotes is quotable as-is. Write every key page so a stranger - human or machine - could describe your offer in one sentence.
Build the entity graph around your site
Models trust businesses whose story is corroborated: consistent name, address and description across your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, industry directories and review platforms - stitched together with Organization schema and sameAs links. Contradictions and orphaned profiles dilute the confidence a model needs to name you.
Reviews and third-party mentions carry weight
AI answers lean on corroborated public evidence: review platforms, best-of lists, news mentions, community recommendations. A steady base of genuine reviews and a handful of legitimate directory and press mentions do more for AI recommendation than any on-site trick - and they compound with your conventional SEO.
Measure it like a channel, not a mystery
This is what AuditHQ’s AI Visibility suite audits: crawler access, server-rendered content, structured data depth, llms.txt, entity and citation signals - scored with specific fixes. Run the free scan for the headline picture, re-test the questions from step one quarterly, and treat AI answers as a channel you monitor like search rankings.
Frequently asked questions
Can I pay to appear in ChatGPT answers?
No. There is no ad placement inside organic AI recommendations today. Mentions are earned through the signals above - which is exactly why building them early, while most competitors ignore the channel, is an advantage.
How long until AI assistants pick up changes to my site?
Assistants with live browsing (ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot) can reflect changes within days to weeks of a recrawl. Knowledge baked into model training updates on the model’s cycle - months. Faster indexing by Bing measurably helps the browsing path, which is why IndexNow is worth wiring.
Does this replace SEO?
No - it extends it. The foundations overlap heavily (crawlability, structured data, authority), so work done for AI visibility strengthens conventional SEO and vice versa. Treat GEO as SEO’s newest surface, not a separate discipline.