The short answer: ChatGPT recommends businesses it can find and trust. Let its search crawler read your website, keep your name, address and services identical everywhere, publish a clear page for each service and area, collect Google reviews, and get mentioned on the lists and directories it already reads. Then check every month.
How ChatGPT decides which businesses to recommend
When someone asks ChatGPT "who is a good electrician in Sutton?" or "which skip hire company should I use in Croydon?", it answers in one of two ways.
- From memory. The model answers from what it learned in training. Businesses that are mentioned often and consistently across the web are more likely to be in there.
- With a live search. ChatGPT searches the web, reads a handful of pages and builds its answer from them. Your website, your Google Business Profile, review sites, directories and "best of" articles all feed this.
Either way, it usually names only two to five businesses. Being on page one of Google helps, but it is not enough: ChatGPT picks the businesses it is most confident about, and confidence comes from clear, consistent facts repeated by sources it trusts.
Nine steps to get recommended
- Check what ChatGPT says about you today. Ask it the questions your customers ask, without naming your business: "best [service] in [town]". Note whether you appear, who appears instead and which websites it cites. Our free AI Visibility Checker does this across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity and gives you a score out of 100.
- Let ChatGPT's crawler read your website. OpenAI says sites that block its search crawler,
OAI-SearchBot, "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" (OpenAI). Check your robots.txt, and check that Cloudflare or your hosting firewall is not blocking AI crawlers by default. - Make your business details identical everywhere. The same business name, address, phone number and opening hours on your website, Google Business Profile, Companies House, Yell, Checkatrade, Bing Places and every directory you are listed in. Conflicting details make AI less sure who you are.
- Publish one clear page for each service and area. If you fit kitchens in Sutton and Croydon, have a page that says exactly that. Open each page with a two or three sentence answer: what you do, where, for whom and roughly what it costs. AI quotes short, specific passages.
- Add structured data. LocalBusiness (or a more specific type such as Plumber or Dentist), Service and FAQPage markup tell machines your facts without them having to guess. Keep it accurate: invented reviews or ratings in your markup do more harm than good.
- Collect Google reviews, steadily. A study of 10,000 local businesses by Insites found the businesses ChatGPT and Perplexity recommended averaged 133 Google reviews, against 11 for those they ignored (reported by Eclincher). That is a correlation, not proof, but reviews are one of the few signals you fully control.
- Get named where AI already looks. Find the "best [service] in [town]" articles, trade directories and local news sites ChatGPT cites for your category, and work on getting listed or mentioned there. A mention on a site it already trusts can matter more than a new page on your own.
- Get into Bing as well as Google. Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and claim your Bing Places listing. Microsoft Copilot runs on Bing, and Bing results are widely reported to feed ChatGPT's searches too.
- Track it every month. AI answers change from week to week, so one check is a snapshot, not a verdict. Ask the same questions each month and keep a record of who gets named.
What helps, what doesn't
| Worth doing | Not worth doing |
|---|---|
| Clear service and area pages | Pages stuffed with every town name in the county |
| Genuine reviews, asked for after every job | Buying reviews or adding star ratings to your own schema |
| Consistent details on real directories | Hundreds of low-quality directory submissions |
| Being mentioned by trusted local and trade sites | Paying anyone who promises a guaranteed ChatGPT ranking |
| Checking the same questions every month | Judging results on a single answer |
There is no way to pay ChatGPT to recommend your business in its normal answers, and nobody can honestly guarantee a place. What you can do is remove every reason it has to pass you over.
See whether ChatGPT recommends you
Run a free check with our AI Visibility Checker, or ask us to do the work for you.
How long it takes
Technical fixes such as crawler access, business details and structured data can be done in a few weeks. ChatGPT's live searches can pick up changes within weeks of a page being re-read. Being recommended from memory takes longer, often months, because it depends on how often your business is mentioned across the web and on when each model is next trained.
Questions, answered
Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?
No. ChatGPT's normal answers are not paid placements. The only way in is to be a business it can find, understand and trust.
Does ranking on Google mean ChatGPT will recommend me?
It helps, because ChatGPT reads pages that rank well when it searches, but it is not enough on its own. ChatGPT names only a few businesses and leans on reviews, directories and articles as well as your own website.
How do I know if ChatGPT can read my website?
Check that your robots.txt does not block OAI-SearchBot and that your firewall or Cloudflare settings let AI crawlers through. Our free AI Visibility Checker tests crawler access as part of its website checks.
How often should I check whether ChatGPT recommends me?
Once a month is enough for most small businesses. Use the same questions each time so you can compare the results fairly.
Sources: OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers; Eclincher, reporting the Insites study of 10,000 local businesses (May 2026).