How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business

Somebody gets named. It might not be you.

That’s a new way to lose a customer, and it’s happening quietly, at volume, without ever showing up in your website analytics. We wrote about why traffic is falling while rankings hold steady. This is the other half of that story. That piece diagnosed the problem. This one’s about the fix.

What’s actually changed

For twenty years, search worked one way. You typed something, you got ten blue links, you clicked. Your job was to be one of those links.

Now a growing share of people type a question and get an answer. Three names, a sentence each, no clicking. ChatGPT does it. Google’s AI overviews do it. So does Perplexity, and Copilot, and whatever the phone assistant does when someone asks it out loud in the car.

The consequence for you is blunt: being on page one used to be enough. Now you need to be in the answer. There’s no page two in an AI recommendation. There’s a shortlist of three, and everyone else does not exist.

Which sounds terrifying until you realise something useful.

The good news nobody’s noticed

These systems don’t have their own opinion of your business. They can’t come and look at your work.

They’re assembling an answer from what’s already written about you, across the internet, by other people and by you. Your Google Business Profile. Your reviews. Your website. Directory listings. Local news. Community pages. Anywhere your name appears alongside what you do and where you do it.

Which means the work is not mysterious and it’s not new. The businesses winning at AI recommendation are, overwhelmingly, the businesses that already did local search properly. Same foundations, one extra layer.

If you’ve been putting off getting your profile, your reviews and your website sorted, this is simply another reason it now costs you more to keep putting it off.

The five things that get you named

1. Your Google Business Profile, complete and current.

This is the raw material. Categories, services, hours, service areas, description, photos. Filled in fully, in plain language, matching what you actually do.

Half-finished profiles get skipped, because an AI assembling a recommendation reaches for the businesses it has clear information about. A profile that says “Building Contractor” and nothing else gives it nothing to say about you. A profile that lists your services, areas and specialities gives it a sentence to write. The full profile checklist is here.

2. Reviews with words in them.

This is the big one, and it’s the one businesses are least prepared for.

A five-star rating with no text is a number. It contributes nothing to a recommendation, because there’s nothing to quote and nothing to summarise.

A review that says “came out to us in Silverdale the same day, replaced the hot water cylinder, tidied up after himself, fair price” is a paragraph of usable evidence. It names the place, the service, the speed, and the character of the person. That’s exactly what an AI recommendation is made of, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that gets quoted back at the person asking.

So the practice changes slightly. It’s no longer just “get more reviews.” It’s get more reviews that describe the job. Which is why we tell people to ask customers to mention what the work actually was, covered in full here.

3. A website that says plainly what you do and where.

AI systems read your site the way a hurried person does. They want to know, quickly and without inference: what services, what areas, what type of customer.

This is where a lot of nice-looking websites fall over. A homepage that opens with “Crafting exceptional spaces since 2009” tells a machine nothing it can use. “We build decks, fences and pergolas across South Auckland” tells it everything.

Plain beats clever. It always did for customers, too. The difference now is that being clever is actively expensive.

4. Mentions somewhere other than your own site.

Anything you say about yourself is weak evidence. Everything other sites say about you is strong evidence.

Local directories. Industry association listings. The community Facebook page. A supplier’s “who we work with.” Local news, a sponsorship, a trade body register. Each one is a place your name, your service and your location appear together, written by someone else.

This is slow and boring and it’s most of the moat. It’s also the thing that almost nobody in your local market is doing deliberately, which is exactly why it’s still available.

5. Consistency across all of it.

Same business name, same address, same phone number, everywhere. If three listings say three different things, all three get trusted less, and the confident-looking competitor gets named instead.

Go and check yours. Old listings from a previous address are the usual offender.

What doesn’t work

Trying to trick it. Hidden text, instructions buried in your page, keyword stuffing. These get filtered, and they’ll do real damage to your normal search visibility on the way past.

Paying someone for “AI optimisation” as a separate product. Be careful here. As of now, the work that gets you named by AI is the same work that gets you found in local search: profile, reviews, clear website, real mentions, consistency. If someone’s offering a distinct AI service at a premium, it’s fair to ask exactly what they’d do that differs from good local SEO. A clear answer is easy to give. If the answer is vague, you may be paying twice for one thing.

Waiting to see how it shakes out. The tools will change. Which model people use will change. What’s being assembled, profiles, reviews, mentions, clear content, will not. That’s the bit worth building, and it takes months, which is the argument for starting now rather than when it’s obvious.

Go and test it

Ten minutes, free, and slightly confronting.

1. Ask ChatGPT for the best in your trade in your town. Note who’s named.
2. Ask it about your business by name. See what it says. Check whether it’s right.
3. Do the same thing in Google’s AI overview.
4. Ask a version a real customer would ask: “I need a [trade] in [suburb] who can come this week.”

If you’re not there, you now know. If a competitor is there, go and look at their profile and their reviews, and you’ll usually see exactly why within about ninety seconds.

The old advice, with higher stakes

Here’s the summary, and it’s deliberately unexciting.

Fill in your profile properly. Get reviews that describe the work. Write plainly about what you do and where. Get mentioned by other local sites. Keep your details consistent everywhere.