[ AI Visibility ]
How Do I Get My Business Recommended by ChatGPT?
[ AI Visibility ]
You cannot pay ChatGPT to recommend your business, and neither can anyone you hire. What you can do is become the business the AI assistants can find, understand and verify: a complete Google Business Profile, plain answers on your website, one consistent identity everywhere, and reviews that read like evidence. This article is the complete method, and the free AI Visibility Kit that goes with it turns it into one afternoon of checklists. No email wall, nothing held back.
Why does it matter? Scale, mostly. OpenAI said in August 2026 that more than a billion people now use ChatGPT every week, up from 900 million in February, and when one of them asks it who to call for a service in your town, it names two or three businesses and stops. The behaviour is already commercial, not curiosity: 42% of CRM software buyers now bring AI search into how they choose, according to HubSpot's January 2026 research, which also measured leads arriving that way converting at three times the rate of its average lead. The people asking the machines are closer to buying, and the shortlist is shorter.
Nobody controls the AI assistants. Not me, not the agencies charging thousands a month for "AI optimisation", nobody. The models do not publish their rules, they change without notice, and two people asking the same question on the same day can get different answers. So here is the admission that the marketing industry keeps swallowing: everything below makes a recommendation more likely, and none of it makes one certain. If that honesty costs me your click, better now than after an invoice. What the work builds is the durable kind of advantage: when ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI summary goes looking for someone to name in your town, you are the business it can actually find, read and trust.
One more admission, because it is unusual: almost nobody is typing this article's exact question into a search box yet. When I checked the phrasing in KWFinder in July 2026 it showed no recorded volume, while the neighbouring term "generative engine optimization" was already growing 81% year on year and advertisers were paying about $18 a click against "answer engine optimization". I am publishing early on purpose. AI assistants answer from material that already exists and has aged, so the page that is indexed months before the question wave arrives is the page that gets quoted when it does. The same logic applies to your business, which is rather the point of everything that follows.
Find out where you stand today, in ten minutes, for free:
The trap is asking "what do you know about my business?" instead. The AI assistants are polite; they will say something warm about anyone. The only test that matters is the customer's question, where you are competing for the recommendation. Keep the date and the results: that is your baseline, and step 7 turns it into a habit.
Google's AI answers about local businesses draw substantially on Google Business Profiles: details, services, reviews, photos, posts. That got more important in late 2025, when Google discontinued the public Q&A section on profiles and replaced it with AI-generated answers. Seeding answers is no longer possible; what remains is keeping the profile so complete that the answers write themselves in your favour. This is also where the free-money warning lives: Google's own local ranking documentation is blunt that a better position can never be requested or bought, so every dollar spent on that promise is wasted twice. The full profile method is my seven-check audit article and its free Afternoon Kit; if your profile scores under 70 on that kit's card, fix it before anything on this page.
AI assistants quote pages that answer questions plainly. Write down the five questions customers actually ring you with, then answer each one on the relevant page of your website, answer first, detail second, the way you would across a table. Say your town and your services in words, not just photos: no machine can read the signage on your van. A machine hunting the answer to "how much does a callout cost in Port Macquarie" quotes the page that says "$180, and here is what it covers", never the one that says "solutions-focused and customer-centric". If you want the deeper how-to on answer-ready pages, my guide to improving AEO goes further, and my plain-English explainer on what search optimisation means in 2026 shows how this work serves Google and the AI assistants at the same time.
ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI summary all decide who to trust partly by cross-checking. Your name, address and phone number should be identical, in spelling and format, on your website, your Google profile, Facebook, Instagram and every directory that lists you, with dead listings and old addresses cleaned out. Every mismatch is a flicker of doubt. Then reviews, which are training data in the most literal sense: recent, specific, replied-to reviews are among the strongest signals a machine can find that a business is real and good. A review that says "fixed our blocked drain same day in Lighthouse Beach" teaches an AI what you do and where you do it. Ask everyone or no one, never pay or trade for reviews, and reply to all of them, because Google's own review guidance notes that "a mix of positive and negative feedback often feels more trustworthy". The legal, word-for-word ask script is in the GBP kit.
Some of this is for your developer, none of it is expensive. Every page needs one clear heading that says what the page is about. Your site's hidden ID card, the structured data, should name your business, services and area; a developer can confirm it in minutes at validator.schema.org. Pages must load properly on a phone, because that is where most of this reading happens: more than half of global web traffic, 52.61%, came from a mobile device in Statcounter's July 2026 count. And there is one free, five-minute extra: an llms.txt file, a new convention that hands AI crawlers a plain summary of who you are. Mine is at saltlinestudio.com.au/llms.txt if you want an example to copy. It is a courtesy to the crawlers, not a magic trick, and I would rather tell you that than sell it to you as one.
AI answers shift constantly: models update, competitors improve, reviews land. Visibility is a garden, not a trophy. Diarise the step-1 test monthly, same questions, same wording, and keep the running list of who gets named. Each month, one thing improves: a new question answered, fresh photos, a review replied to. The machines notice steady better than splashy. Here is the whole afternoon at a glance:
| Station | Time | Done when |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Baseline test | 10 min | Today's date and both AI answers written down |
| 2 · Google Business Profile | 15 min | Profile Strength complete; GBP kit scorecard over 70 |
| 3 · Questions answered on site | 45 min | Your five most-asked questions answerable without calling |
| 4 · One identity | 20 min | Searching your name shows one consistent business, no ghosts |
| 5 · Reviews | 30 min | Last three reviews replied to; the ask script saved in your phone |
| 6 · Machine-readable site | 30 min | Structured data validates; nothing blocks crawlers; phone speed fine |
| 7 · Monthly re-test | 10 min | The recurring appointment exists; baseline already logged |
Total: 160 minutes, which is 2 hours 40 with the kettle on. The arithmetic worth doing before you decide it is not worth an afternoon: if being one of the names ChatGPT or Gemini gives brings you even one additional $400 job each month, that is $4,800 a year, earned by the least glamorous Saturday of your winter.
Everything above, plus the checklists, the traps, the done-when tests and a scorecard out of 100, is now a free PDF: the AI Visibility Kit. It is the sibling of my Google Business Profile Afternoon Kit, built the same way: one afternoon, seven stations, no jargon, no email wall. Nothing in it is held back for a sales call, and page one repeats the promise this article opened with, that nobody can guarantee you a spot and the kit never pretends otherwise.
Fair enough; it is an afternoon, and you have a business to run. The Found Report covers every station here and everything else you own online, and it includes the live AI test run for you, with the answers screenshotted as evidence of exactly what ChatGPT and Gemini say about your business today. $550 flat, five business days. If the monthly re-test is the part you will never get to, it is done and reported for you inside my $1,200-a-month organic growth partnership. And if you just want the two-minute version right now, the free Found Score reads your website the way the machines do. Whichever door you pick, run the baseline test this week. You cannot improve a list you have never looked at.
Founder & digital marketing specialist at Saltline Studio, Port Macquarie. Helping small businesses grow with custom websites and organic search.