2026-11-02 · Last updated 2026-11-02

How to get ChatGPT to recommend my business: a 4-week plan for local businesses

Nobody can make ChatGPT recommend a business, and anyone who promises it is guessing. What you can do is give it more to find: listings with the same details everywhere, recent reviews, mentions on local sites, and a website its search bots can read. This plan does that in four weeks, at an hour or two a week.

Start by finding out where you stand. The free AI visibility checker scores what assistants can read about you out of 100 and lists your top five fixes. If you'd like the reasons first, why your business isn't showing up on ChatGPT explains the seven usual causes and how to check each one.

Check my business free

Week 1: take a baseline and unblock the bots

• Run the checker and write down your score and the date.
• Ask the assistants. Put the checker's six test questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, and record how many of the 24 answers named you. This number matters more than the score.
• List your competitors' sources. When ChatGPT or Perplexity names a competitor, it usually shows the pages it used. Write down every directory, review site and local page that comes up. That list is your week 3.
• Fix robots.txt first if the checker says the AI search bots are blocked. It's often a five-minute change, and nothing else on your site counts until those bots can read it.

Week 2: make your details match everywhere

• Choose one version of your business name, address and phone. The one on your Google Business Profile is usually the right anchor.
• Fix your own site: the footer, the contact page and your LocalBusiness schema.
• Fix your profiles: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and every directory listing you already have. Claim old listings so you can edit them, and close duplicates or ones with a previous address.
• Add sameAs links in your schema to the profiles you've just tidied, so they read as one business.

Week 3: get listed where your competitors are

Work through the list from week 1. For most Australian local businesses it includes some of TrueLocal, Yellow Pages, Hotfrog, Yelp, Apple Business Connect and Bing Places, plus a directory for your trade.

Then look for genuine local mentions, the kind a person would also find useful:

• your trade association or industry body's member directory;
• your local chamber of commerce or business association;
• your council's business directory, if it has one;
• a local club or event you sponsor that lists its sponsors.

Use exactly the same name, address and phone on every one. Don't buy bulk listings from sites nobody visits, and never buy or write reviews. The ACCC treats fake reviews as misleading conduct, and review sites can remove them.

Week 4: reviews and answers on your own site

• Ask for reviews. Send customers from the last month your Google review link, and ask regulars to review you on one other site where your competitors have reviews. Reply to every review, good or bad. Our free review health check shows how your rating, count and recency compare with the top three in your suburb.
• Answer questions on your main service page. Add a few headings customers actually ask ("Do you cover Glenelg?", "How much is a call-out?") with the answer in the first sentence under each, and a visible "Last updated" date.
• llms.txt is optional. Add one if you like, but it hasn't been shown to change who gets named.

Then measure again

About a month after week 4, run the checker again and ask the same 24 questions. Compare both numbers with week 1. Answers vary from one ask to the next, so look at the trend over two or three months rather than a single result. Site changes can be picked up within days or weeks; listings and reviews take longer to add up.

What doesn't help

• Paying for a "ChatGPT ranking". OpenAI hasn't published how ChatGPT picks businesses, and no outside company controls its answers.
• Repeating "best plumber in Norwood" all over your pages. It reads badly to people, and assistants summarise what a page says, not how often it says it.
• Hidden text aimed at AI. Search engines treat hidden text as spam.
• Expecting schema or llms.txt alone to do it. Owners who tried report they helped little on their own; listings and reviews on other sites helped more.

If you'd rather we did the site work in weeks 1, 2 and 4, plus a directory checklist for your trade and city, that's the AI Visibility Fix. This is general information, not legal advice.

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