How to get your business found by ChatGPT

For a local recommendation, assistants mostly do not answer from memory. They look things up, then write an answer from what they find — and what they find about a small business is overwhelmingly other people’s records of it, not the business’s own website. Your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your listings in directories, any article that mentions you.

That is the uncomfortable part for anyone selling website work: the website is the piece you control most and the piece that counts least. Every competitor has one too. What separates the businesses that get named is third-party evidence that they exist, are real, and are any good.

The practical consequence is that the order of work is not what most people expect. Reviews and listings first. The website matters, but it matters as the thing that confirms and completes what the assistant already found elsewhere.

Yes, but probably not the way you are picturing. When ChatGPT searches the web it looks things up in Bing’s index rather than Google’s. So a business that has never been submitted to Bing can be perfectly findable on Google and effectively invisible to ChatGPT. Adding your site to Bing Webmaster Tools is free, takes about ten minutes, and is the single most skipped step in this whole subject.

It is also worth knowing that the assistants run more than one kind of crawler. Some fetch pages to train future models; others fetch pages to answer a question somebody is asking right now. Blocking the first kind keeps you out of future models. Blocking the second kind takes you out of the answers being given today — which is the expensive mistake, and it is usually made by accident.

Easily, and this is worth checking before anything else, because nothing else works while it is true. Some hosts and security services now block AI crawlers by default — Cloudflare began doing so for new domains and free plans in September 2026. If your site sits behind one of those defaults, the crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are being turned away before they ever see a page.

Your robots.txt file can invite them in, but robots.txt is only a request. A block at the host level is a wall, and the wall wins. Check your host or CDN dashboard for an AI crawler or bot-control setting, and make sure the search crawlers are allowed.

One trap to watch for: on some services, blocking "AI training" also blocks Googlebot and Bingbot, because those crawlers do both jobs. Turning off AI training that way can quietly take you out of ordinary search as well.

• Allow OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User — OpenAI
• Allow Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User — Anthropic
• Allow PerplexityBot — Perplexity
• Allow Googlebot and Bingbot — the ordinary search crawlers the assistants lean on

Because it is the record an assistant can check. A website is a business describing itself; a Google Business Profile is a business described in a structured, verified place alongside reviews written by other people. When an assistant has to decide which of several local businesses to name, the one with a complete, current, well-reviewed profile is the one it can stand behind.

Half-finished profiles get skipped. Fill in every service as its own entry, set the areas you actually cover, add your hours, link the website, and put up photographs — of the work, of the place, of you. Post something every couple of weeks. Recency is part of what makes a listing look live rather than abandoned.

They are the closest thing to a deciding factor. For local recommendations, how many reviews you have and how recent they are tends to matter more than the average score. A business with thirty reviews averaging 4.6 generally reads as safer to recommend than one with three perfect ones, because volume and recency are harder to fake than a rating.

Ask at the moment the work is finished and the customer is pleased, not three weeks later when the feeling has faded. Make it one tap — a short link or a QR code, not an instruction to search for you. And never buy reviews or write them yourself: platforms remove them, and a removal damages the exact profile doing all this work for you.

Write pages that answer one real question completely. Assistants quote passages rather than whole pages — they lift a few paragraphs and build an answer out of them — so a paragraph that only makes sense in the context of the page around it cannot be used. A paragraph that stands on its own can.

In practice that means a question as a heading, then an answer directly beneath it that would still make sense if someone read nothing else. It means giving each service its own page instead of one long list, so there is something specific to match against a specific question. And it means saying the plain things out loud: what you do, where, what it costs, who it is for. A page that is coy about its prices cannot be quoted about its prices.

Almost certainly not, and anyone selling you "llms.txt optimisation" is telling on themselves. It is a proposed convention for handing language models a summary of your site, and the major assistants have not adopted it in the products that answer questions. Google has said plainly that its Search systems do not use it. Measurements of real crawler traffic find these files are requested very rarely.

It costs almost nothing to publish one, so there is no harm in it — this site serves one. But it belongs in the same category as a tidy folder structure: pleasant, harmless, and not the reason anybody will ever recommend you.

No. Nobody controls what an assistant says. There is no advertising slot to buy, no submission form that grants a mention, and the systems change month to month. Any agency promising you a citation is promising something it cannot deliver, in exactly the way that agencies have promised guaranteed Google rankings for twenty years.

What can honestly be promised is the work: making sure nothing is blocking the crawlers, that your listings are complete and consistent, that your details match everywhere they appear, and that your pages answer real questions in a form that can be quoted. That is the part within anyone’s control, and it is the part that makes a mention possible.

Today, not much — and it is worth hearing that from someone who does this work. Traffic arriving from AI assistants is still a small fraction of overall web traffic, well behind ordinary search. A small business that judged this work by visitor numbers in the first year would conclude it was a waste of money.

The reason to do it anyway is that it is the same work. Complete listings, consistent details, pages that answer questions, nothing blocking the crawlers — all of it helps you in ordinary Google search too, which is where your customers are today. You are not paying extra for a bet on the future; you are doing the thing you needed to do regardless, in a way that happens to also work when somebody asks an assistant instead.

Ask, and write down the answer. Once a month, put the same handful of questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers, and record whether your business came up. Keep it in a plain text file so you can see movement over months rather than guessing.

Begin with the simplest question of all: ask each assistant about your business by name. Being described accurately comes before being recommended, and if an assistant has your prices or your services wrong, that is a fixable problem with your listings rather than a mysterious one. Only once you are described correctly is it worth watching the competitive questions.

• "[Your business name] [your town]" — do they describe you correctly?
• "Who are the best [your trade] in [your town]?"
• "I need a [your trade], who should I call?"
• "What does [your service] cost?"

In this order, because each step is worth more than the one after it. Most of it is free and none of it needs an agency.

• Check that your host or CDN is not blocking AI crawlers
• Finish your Google Business Profile completely — every service, hours, photos
• Start asking every happy customer for a review, at the moment they are happy
• Submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools, and to Google Search Console
• Claim the free listings: Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, your local chamber
• Make your name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear
• Then, and only then, write pages that answer the questions your customers ask