How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT
A growing share of "who should I hire" questions never reach a results page. Someone asks an assistant, gets two or three names, and calls one. There is no page two. Being one of those names is a technical problem before it is a marketing one.
Why AI answers differ from search results
A search engine ranks documents. An assistant assembles an answer. To name you, it has to be confident about three things: that you exist as a specific entity, that you do the specific thing being asked about, and that you serve the specific place mentioned. Every ambiguity in those three areas is a reason to name someone else instead.
01 — Make your identity machine-readable
Structured data is how you state facts unambiguously. LocalBusiness or a more specific subtype, with legal name, address, phone, opening hours, service area, accepted payment and links to your profiles. Then Service schema for each thing you sell, and Review or AggregateRating only where you have genuine review data to back it.
The rule is simple: if a fact matters to a buying decision, it should exist as structured data, not only as words inside a hero image.
02 — Be consistent everywhere
Assistants cross-check. A phone number that differs between your footer and your Google profile, or a suite number that appears three ways, lowers confidence in the whole entity. Pick one canonical version of your name, address and phone and enforce it across every listing you control.
03 — Write in answers, not adjectives
"Premier provider of best-in-class solutions" is unusable to a model. "We install polyaspartic garage floor coatings in Dallas and Fort Worth, typically in one day, starting around $6 per square foot" is quotable. Short, factual, self-contained paragraphs get lifted into answers; marketing prose does not.
04 — Let the right crawlers in
Some sites block AI user agents by default through robots.txt or a CDN rule and then wonder why they never get cited. Decide deliberately which assistants you want citing you, and make sure your pages render their main content server-side rather than only after JavaScript executes.
05 — Earn mentions off your own site
Models weigh corroboration. Reviews that describe your actual work, a local news mention, a supplier or manufacturer listing you as a certified installer, an industry association page — these are the sources that turn "a company exists" into "this company is a reasonable recommendation."
The signals worth fixing first
- LocalBusiness schema with your exact name, address, phone, hours, service area and price range.
- Identical NAP details on your site, Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places and directories.
- A plain-language services page that states what you do, where, and for whom — no vague slogans.
- An FAQ that answers the literal questions people ask an assistant.
- A robots.txt that permits AI crawlers you want citing you.
- Third-party mentions: reviews, local press, association listings, supplier pages.