How to get recommended by ChatGPT.

What ChatGPT is actually drawing on

When someone asks for a recommendation, the answer comes from some combination of what the model absorbed during training and what it retrieves live when it searches the web. Which matters more depends on the question. Anything time-sensitive or local tends to trigger a live look.

The practical consequence is the same either way. Your own website is one input among many, and rarely the decisive one. A business that only exists on its own domain is a single unverified claim. A business that appears consistently across a Google Business Profile, Companies House, two or three directories, a trade body and a local news mention is something the model can corroborate, and corroboration is what turns "a business exists" into "this is one I'll name."

That's why most of the useful work here happens off your site, which is the opposite of how SEO advice usually goes.

Seven things that actually help

1. Let the crawlers in

Check your robots.txt isn't blocking AI crawlers. OpenAI has used separate agents for different jobs: training, search indexing, and fetching a page when a user asks about it. Blocking the search ones removes you from consideration entirely. The specific names change, so check OpenAI's current documentation rather than trusting a blog post. If your file says User-agent: * followed by Allow: /, you're fine.

This one is worth checking first because it's binary. Some site builders and security plugins block these agents by default, and no amount of other work compensates.

2. Make your details identical everywhere

Name, address, phone, opening hours, services. Not similar. Identical. "251 Marketing Ltd" and "251Marketing" and "251 Marketing" read as three possible entities, and contradictions make a model hedge. Hedging means naming someone else.

3. Get mentioned by other people

Directory listings, trade associations, supplier and partner pages, local press, sponsorship pages, chambers of commerce. This is the slowest work on the list and the highest value. If your business is only ever described by you, there's nothing to verify against.

4. Finish your Google Business Profile

Complete every field, keep hours current, add services and photos. It's a heavily-referenced structured source about local businesses, and an incomplete profile is a weak signal about a real business rather than a neutral one.

5. Collect reviews, and reply to them

Reviews serve double duty: they're a trust signal, and they're text other people wrote describing what you do. A review saying "fixed our boiler in Southbourne same day" is corroboration of your service and your area in a way your own service page can't be.

6. Add structured data

Schema markup stating plainly what your business is, where it operates, what it offers and who runs it. It removes ambiguity for anything reading the page programmatically, and it's the cheapest item on this list to implement.

7. Write answers that can be lifted

Assistants extract sentences. Put the direct answer in the first line or two of a page, use specific numbers, include dates, and keep the surrounding prose plain. Content that circles the point for three paragraphs before answering doesn't get quoted, however well it reads.

What you can't do

If an agency offers you any of the above, that tells you what you need to know about the rest of their proposal.

How to test it

Ask it. That's genuinely the method, and it costs nothing.

1. Ask as a customer would. Try "who's a good electrician in Bournemouth?", not your business name. This tells you whether you're in consideration at all.
2. Then ask about you by name. Try "what do you know about [your business]?" This tells you whether what it believes is accurate.
3. Record both, monthly. Answers vary between sessions, so one check is a data point, not a result. A pattern over a few months is meaningful.

The second question is the one that catches real problems. Being named but described with the wrong services, an old address or an area you left three years ago is its own failure, and it's almost always traceable to a stale listing somewhere you'd forgotten existed.

How long it takes

There's no honest fixed answer. Changes that depend on live browsing can show up within days of your pages being re-crawled. Anything depending on wider corroboration, such as new directory listings, press mentions and reviews accumulating, takes months, because it's other people's websites changing, not yours.

Treat it as slow compounding work rather than a switch you flip. The upside is that the same groundwork improves your ordinary search performance, so it's rarely money spent on one outcome only.

Want to know what ChatGPT currently says about your business? Send us your website and we'll check and tell you, free. If it's describing you wrongly, we'll tell you why.