How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT: a plan for small and local businesses

When someone asks ChatGPT for “a good plumber near me” or “the best dentist in Laval”, it usually searches the web before it answers. OpenAI’s help center says ChatGPT search may share search queries with third-party search providers such as Bing, and uses approximate location to make results more accurate. The answer is then built from the pages, listings and reviews that search returns.

That means three things decide whether you are named: whether your business can be found for the question at all, whether the sources agree about what you do and where, and whether there is enough recent evidence (reviews, mentions, clear service pages) for the assistant to recommend you with confidence.

Nobody outside OpenAI knows the exact weighting, and you cannot pay to be recommended in the answer itself. What you can control is the evidence. That is the whole plan below.

Because customers already ask. BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey of 1,002 US consumers found use of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for local recommendations rose from 6% to 45% in a year, behind only Google and Facebook as a source.

Our view: for most local businesses AI answers will not replace Google this year, but they now decide part of the shortlist before anyone visits your site. If the assistant names three competitors and not you, you never get the call. The fixes that help in ChatGPT also help in Google’s map results, so the work is not wasted either way.

Work through these in order. The first two take an afternoon; the rest are a month of steady work.

1. Check that OpenAI can read your site. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and make sure OAI-SearchBot is not blocked. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Some website builders and security plugins block AI crawlers by default.
2. Make your basic facts identical everywhere: business name, address (or service area), phone, hours and website on your site, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Facebook, Apple Maps and the two or three directories that matter in your trade.
3. Publish one page per main service, and one per city or area you serve if the work differs there. Each page should say in its first two sentences what you do, for whom, where, and how to book, with prices or price ranges if you can share them.
4. Add a short questions section to each service page with the questions customers actually ask on the phone (“Do you do emergency calls on weekends?”). Assistants answer questions; give them yours.
5. Ask every happy customer for a review, every week, with a direct link or QR code. Reply to every review. Steady and recent beats a burst of fifty in one month.
6. Get mentioned where your customers look: local news, your trade association, supplier “find an installer” pages, sponsorships with a link. Each one is an independent source that agrees with your own site.

Ask it the way a customer would, from a fresh chat: “Who is a good [service] in [city]?”, “Is [your business] any good?”, “Which [service] in [city] does [the thing you are best at]?”. Write down who is named, what is said about you, and which sources are cited. Repeat monthly with the same five questions so you can see change.

If the answer is wrong (old address, closed, wrong services), the fix is almost always a source: find the page that says it and correct it. OpenAI has also started letting businesses claim and correct a profile in ChatGPT; see our article on claiming your business in the ChatGPT Business Hub.

Example with stated assumptions, not a client result. A plumbing company serves three suburbs, has 40 Google reviews (the newest from five months ago), one “Services” page listing twelve services, and a website builder that blocks AI crawlers.

Month one: unblock OAI-SearchBot, fix a phone number that differs on Facebook and an old directory, split the services page into four pages (emergency repairs, water heaters, drain cleaning, renovations), each with a ten-question section, and ask every customer for a review by text the day the job closes. If the team closes 25 jobs a month and one in four leaves a review, that is about six new reviews a month, enough to keep the profile recent.

Month two: one sponsorship with a link from a local hockey league and a listing on the water heater manufacturer’s installer page. Then re-run the five test questions. Changes in AI answers are not instant and are never guaranteed, which is why we track the same questions monthly instead of judging after a week.

• Tools that promise to “submit” your business to ChatGPT. There is no submission for the answers themselves; claim your profile where OpenAI offers it and fix your sources.
• Hundreds of thin city pages with the same text. They read as spam to Google and give assistants nothing new.
• Buying reviews or offering discounts for them. Google says incentives for reviews are strictly prohibited, and fake reviews can get a profile suspended.

If you want the full sequence (Google profile, local SEO, ads, follow-up and tracking) in one place, start from our small business growth hub.