How to get your business to show up in ChatGPT recommendations
What an AI assistant needs to know about your business before it will name you in an answer — and how to give it that.
The short answer
To be recommended by ChatGPT, let AI crawlers read your site, state plainly what you do, who you serve and where, describe your business identically on your Google profile and directories, and earn a few third-party mentions. Assistants name businesses they can read, verify and cross-check.
An AI assistant does not rank pages. It reads the web, decides which businesses it is confident about, and names two or three. Your job is to be one of the businesses it feels safe naming.
That confidence comes from four things, in this order.
1. Let the assistants read you
AI assistants use named crawlers. If your robots file blocks them, or your text only appears after a script runs, you are invisible no matter how good your site is.
- Allow OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (OpenAI), PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot and Google-Extended.
- Make sure your words are in the page itself, not loaded in afterwards.
- Keep one clear page per service, rather than one long scrolling page.
2. Say exactly what you are, in one sentence
Assistants summarise. Give them a sentence worth copying: 'Petal & Bloom is a brand photography studio in Boise, Idaho, working with women-owned service businesses.' Service, audience, place. Put it on your home page and your about page, in the same words.
3. Answer the questions people actually ask an assistant
Nobody asks ChatGPT for 'affordable premium solutions'. They ask what it costs, how long it takes, whether you travel, and what happens if it rains. Pages that answer those questions directly are the pages assistants quote.
4. Be described the same way somewhere other than your site
Your Google Business Profile, two to four directories and your social bios should all say the same thing, with the same name, address and phone number. Then earn a mention you did not write: a local blog, a venue's preferred vendor list, a podcast. One genuine mention a quarter is plenty.
What not to bother with
There is no way to submit your business to ChatGPT, no paid placement inside answers, and no plugin that fixes this. Anyone selling you one is selling you nothing. The work above is the work.
Want this done for your site, one fix at a time?
Bloom checks your website, Google profile and social bios, then walks you through the fixes in plain English.
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