How to get your business on ChatGPT when customers ask

Some customers now ask ChatGPT before they search Google: “who's a good wedding photographer in Denver for a small wedding?”, “plumber in Phoenix who can come today”. The answer names two or three businesses, and people tend to call one of them. If you're wondering how to get your business on ChatGPT, most of it comes down to things you already know: your website, your Google Business Profile and what other sites say about you.

This guide covers what ChatGPT reads before it names a business, the seven steps that are in your hands, what not to waste money on, and how to check whether it mentions you.

How ChatGPT decides which businesses to name

ChatGPT answers from two things: what it learned in training, which you can't change, and what it looks up on the web when you ask, which you can influence. When a question needs current or local information (“open now”, “near me”, “how much”), it searches the web and shows the sources it used. Those sources are your opening.

It searches with its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI says sites that block it won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers (its crawler docs). Perplexity does the same with PerplexityBot (its docs), and Microsoft's Copilot runs on Bing.

Seven steps to get your business mentioned by ChatGPT

1. Ask it yourself, the way a customer would

Open ChatGPT and ask five or six questions a customer who doesn't know you would ask: your service plus your city, “best” whatever you do in your area, what it costs. Write down who comes up, which sources are linked and what's said about you. That's your baseline; ask the same questions again every month.

2. Let the search crawlers in

Have whoever runs your site check the robots.txt file. OpenAI separates GPTBot, which reads to train its models, from OAI-SearchBot, which reads to answer searches. You can block the first if you don't want your content used for training; block the second and you can't show up in ChatGPT's search answers.

3. Get your business on Bing, Apple Maps and Yelp

Plenty of businesses only look after Google. Copilot runs on Bing, so add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and your business to Bing Places, and keep Apple Maps and Yelp current, since your customers use them too. Since February 2026, Bing shows how often Copilot cites your site in its AI Performance report.

4. One page per service that answers up front

If your site says “we deliver solutions for every need”, an AI has nothing to quote. Each service needs its own page, and that page should open with the answer: what it is, who it's for, where you work, what it costs or what the price depends on, and how long it takes. Then the questions customers always ask, in your words.

5. Keep your details the same everywhere

Name, address, phone, hours and services should match on your site, your Google profile, Bing, Apple Maps, Yelp and the directories in your trade. When every source says something different, the AI doesn't know which to trust and sometimes picks the old one. Your Google profile carries a lot of weight for local questions; how to rank higher on Google Maps walks through it.

6. Get other sites talking about you

Recent reviews you reply to, your trade association, your chamber of commerce, local news, best-of lists and comparison sites. That's what these tools read before they trust a name. No shortcuts: Google's spam policies target bought links and mass-produced content, and what Google demotes rarely ends up in its AI answers.

7. Measure what can be measured

Repeat the questions from step 1 every month, check your analytics for visits from chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai, and look at Bing's report. Google counts visits from AI Overviews and AI Mode inside the Search Console Performance report, mixed in with your other web search traffic.

What you'll be offered that doesn't work

• “Guaranteed ChatGPT rankings.” Nobody controls who it names in each answer, and the answer changes with the day and the wording.
• An llms.txt file as the fix. Google says no AI text files or special markup are needed for its AI features, and other tools haven't confirmed they use one.
• Hundreds of AI-written pages. That's the scaled content Google treats as spam.
• Bought reviews or mentions. They break Google's and Yelp's rules, and they show.

And in Google's AI Overviews

AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on the same index as regular Google search, and may run several related searches to build one answer. Google says in AI features and your website that there are no extra requirements: a page that's indexed and eligible to show with a snippet can appear. The seven steps above apply just the same.

Want to see what AI tools say about your business today? The free audit includes the screenshots and what we'd fix first.