How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

Start with where you stand. Discoverable's free checker lets you check if your business is on ChatGPT: it puts 3 buying questions about your category to ChatGPT in a logged-out session, the way a customer without an account sees it, and shows whether each answer named your business and which pages it cited. It needs no login.

Then ask ChatGPT yourself, in a private browser window, the questions your customers would ask, such as "best plumber in Leeds" or "which accountant near me is good for sole traders". Note which businesses it names, what it says about each one and which websites it links to. Those websites are where your work starts.

A strong Google ranking does not carry over on its own. In Discoverable's UK AI Shortlist Study, ChatGPT did not name the business ranked first on Google in 72.5% of eligible answers to the same buying question.

Listing your business on ChatGPT, as OpenAI's developer documentation describes it, is for shops and for booking and quote platforms, with no route for a single local business. Shops can apply to send product feeds, and OpenAI's merchants page says a shop that sells through Shopify or Etsy is already integrated and needs no application. Booking and quote platforms that OpenAI approves can add its Reserve and Get Quote buttons to the businesses they list. OpenAI's product feed guide says onboarding "is currently available to approved partners", and the feed format "currently targets the US". The Get Quote button for local services is "in beta and being tested with approved partners", each of which sends ChatGPT a feed of many local business records.

So a plumber or an accountant has nothing to apply for; the guide on whether you can list your business on ChatGPT goes through each programme and who it is for. Shops have a route of their own, set out in how to get your products recommended by ChatGPT. What gets you named is what ChatGPT can read about you, and the rest of this guide covers that. Paid ads are a separate matter, answered under Questions below.

OpenAI uses a crawler called OAI-SearchBot to find websites for ChatGPT's search results. Its crawler documentation says sites that block it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers", and that a change to your robots.txt file can take about 24 hours to reach its systems. GPTBot is a separate crawler that collects pages for training models, and OpenAI says to use the OAI-SearchBot line to manage whether you appear in search.

A hosting default or an old rule written to keep out all bots can block these crawlers without you knowing. The free AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt and shows which AI crawlers it lets in.

Then put the facts customers ask about on your pages as plain text: what you do and who for, the towns you cover, your prices or a starting price, your opening hours and how to book. Use the same business name, address and phone number everywhere they appear, on your site and off it.

Prices and dates are worth the effort. In a 2026 study that ran 252,000 controlled trials across six AI models, each trial giving a model two pages that differed in one detail, a page that stated a price was more often the first source cited, as was one with a recent date, while formatting-only changes made little difference.

Your website is one voice, and an interested one. Assistants such as ChatGPT tend to name businesses that several independent websites describe in the same way, which puts review sites, "best of" lists, forum threads and local news ahead of your homepage. The guide to how ChatGPT decides which businesses to recommend explains why.

For a local business, start where your customers already look. The guide to how ChatGPT recommends local businesses covers what it reads about your area.

1. Reviews. Ask each happy customer for a review on Google and on the review site your trade uses, and ask them to say what you did and where. Reply to every review, and never write or buy one. The guide to which review sites AI reads covers the ones that get quoted.

2. Local lists and directories. Search "best" with your trade and your town, note the lists and directories on the first page, and ask to be added wherever a list takes submissions. Check that your details there match your website.

3. Forums. Where people in your area ask for recommendations, answer helpfully under your own name and say that you run the business. The guide to what works on Reddit has the ground rules.

4. Local press and trade bodies. A news story, an award or a member directory entry is one more independent page that names you.

Two other companies say they help power ChatGPT. Yelp said in its August results that its content is powering local discovery for ChatGPT, and Microsoft says the infrastructure Copilot uses to search the web also powers ChatGPT. Neither says how much a given answer depends on it, and both are cheap to cover: complete your Yelp page, and claim a free Bing Places for Business listing, which can import your details from Google.

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode follow the rules of ordinary Google Search. Google's guide to its AI features says "there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode", counts an up-to-date Business Profile among the SEO basics that are still worthwhile, and says you do not need AI text files or new markup.

Google's help for local results says they are "mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity", that more reviews and positive ratings can help, and that there is no way to pay for a better local ranking. Keep your profile's category, services, hours and photos complete, and keep the reviews coming.

The guide on how to get your business into Google AI Overviews goes further.

Unblocking OAI-SearchBot is the fastest change, at about a day by OpenAI's figure. A new review, list entry or article has to be found and read before it can show up in an answer, and OpenAI's crawler page gives no timescale for that. Answers ChatGPT gives without searching come from what its model learned in training, up to the date OpenAI lists as the model's knowledge cutoff, so those answers can lag behind your changes until a newer model arrives.

Measure it yourself: ask the same questions every month and note what changed. ChatGPT can give a different answer to the same question an hour later, so judge by the pattern across several checks rather than by one answer.

Discoverable's plans keep that record for you. They ask your 10 tracked prompts every week on each of the seven AI services Discoverable measures, ChatGPT included, and the rest of your prompts monthly, with a score trend and a plan of what to fix. The ChatGPT visibility tracker shows what you get for ChatGPT. The Growth and Scale plans each start with a 30-day free trial, with a card at checkout.

Can I pay ChatGPT to promote my business? OpenAI sells ads in ChatGPT, and its ads documentation covers creating them and measuring the sales or sign-ups they bring to your website. Buying one is a separate decision from being named in the answer; the piece on whether you can advertise your business on ChatGPT covers what OpenAI says about keeping the two apart.

Is it free to get my business on ChatGPT? Yes. The steps in this guide cost time rather than money, apart from any list or directory that charges to include you.

Why doesn't ChatGPT mention my business? The usual causes are too few independent pages that mention you, or a website its crawler cannot read. The guide on why ChatGPT doesn't mention your business goes through each cause and its fix.

How do I get my business to show up in other AI assistants? Follow the same steps. Other assistants also answer from what the web says about you, though each draws on its own mix of sources, so test the ones your customers use. This one-hour method shows how to check if your business is visible in AI search.