How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT

Ask ChatGPT to recommend a plumber in your city, a bakery for a birthday cake, or a bookkeeper for a small shop, and it will name a few. Your customers are already asking questions like that. So the real question for you is simple: when someone asks about a business like yours, does the assistant know you exist, and can it describe you clearly enough to put your name in the answer?

Can you actually get ChatGPT to recommend your business?

Short answer: yes, but not directly. There's no ad slot, no submission form, no "get recommended" button. When ChatGPT names a business, it's drawing on what it learned during training and, increasingly, on live web results it pulls in the moment. Both come down to the same thing: how you're represented across the wider web. If clear, consistent information about you exists in the places the model reads, you can show up. If it doesn't, you're invisible, no matter how good the business is.

That's the uncomfortable part. A great café with a thin, inconsistent web presence loses to an average one that's described clearly everywhere. The assistant isn't judging your croissants. It's judging how legible you are to a machine.

What is generative engine optimization (GEO), and how is it different from SEO?

GEO, generative engine optimization, sometimes called answer engine optimization (AEO), is the practice of making your business easy for AI assistants to find, understand, and cite in their answers. Traditional SEO tries to rank a link on a page of results. GEO tries to get you into the answer itself, ideally with your name attached.

The overlap is large. Most of what helps you rank on Google, clear pages, real reviews, a consistent business listing, also helps an AI understand you. But the win condition is different. With SEO the reward is a click from a results page. With GEO the reward is being the source the assistant summarizes and names. That shift is worth taking seriously: more than 800 million people now use ChatGPT every week (TechCrunch), and about half of U.S. adults use AI chatbots, with roughly four in ten of them using these tools to search for information (Pew Research Center). Learning to show up in AI search, not just on Google, is becoming part of the job.

Why does AI recommend some businesses and not others?

Assistants don't recommend the best business. They recommend the best-described one they can verify. A model builds its answer from patterns across many sources. When several independent places describe you the same way, same name, same service, same city, the model gets confident enough to say your name. When information about you is thin, contradictory, or trapped inside an image or a PDF, it stays vague and names someone else.

There's research behind this. A peer-reviewed study on generative engine optimization found that shaping a page for how these engines read it can boost how often a source is included in AI answers by up to 40% (Aggarwal et al.). The tactics that worked were unglamorous: clear citations, concrete statistics, plain and authoritative writing. The same signals a careful person uses to decide a source is trustworthy.

If an assistant keeps skipping you, the cause is usually mechanical, not mysterious. It's worth understanding why AI can't find your business before you spend a cent trying to fix it.

How do I actually get recommended by ChatGPT?

There's no single switch. It's a handful of habits that together make you legible to a machine. Do them roughly in this order.

Be genuinely mentioned across the web

AI trusts what it sees corroborated in more than one place. So your goal is honest presence, not link tricks: a listing in the directories your industry actually uses, a mention in local press or a community roundup, a profile on the review site your customers check, an interview on a relevant blog or podcast. Each real mention is a small vote that you exist and do what you say. You can't fake this at scale, and models are getting better at spotting people who try.

Make your site say clearly who you are, what you do, and where

Read your homepage as a stranger. Can a machine tell, in plain sentences, what you sell, who it's for, and the area you serve? Put it in text, not buried in a logo or a hero image the model can't read. Add an about page with real detail. Where it fits, add structured data (schema) so the key facts, your name, address, hours, and services, are labeled in a format machines parse without guessing.

Be in the places AI reads

Assistants lean on a predictable set of sources: your Google Business Profile, major maps and directories, review platforms, reference sites, and well-known industry lists. A complete, verified profile is the highest-leverage one for a local business, because it feeds both Google and several assistants' understanding of who's near a searcher. If you serve a local area, start by learning how to show up on Google as a local business.

Keep your name, address, and phone identical everywhere

This is called NAP consistency, and it's boring and it matters. If your bakery is "Sunrise Bakery" on your site, "Sunrise Bakehouse" on Facebook, and a different phone number on an old directory, a model can't tell whether that's one business or three, so it hedges and leaves you out. Pick one exact name, address, and phone, and make every listing match, character for character.

Collect honest reviews and answer the real questions in your content

Reviews are corroboration a model can read at scale: many independent people describing what you do and how well. Ask every happy customer, and reply in plain language that restates what you do ("glad the gluten-free sourdough worked out"). Then write content around the actual questions customers type: whether you're open on Sundays, whether you do same-day work, what something costs near them. When your page already answers the question a person asks the assistant, you're the obvious thing to quote.

Add an llms.txt so assistants can find your key pages

An llms.txt is a simple text file at the root of your site that points AI tools to your most important, cleanest pages, a plain-language map for machines. It won't force anyone to recommend you, and support is still uneven, but it's low effort and it signals that your key information lives here, in a form built to be read. Here's what llms.txt is and how to make one.

Can anyone guarantee I'll get recommended, and how long does it take?

No, and be wary of anyone who promises it. Nobody controls what a model says, and there's no paid placement inside a ChatGPT answer today. What you can control is being the clearest, best-referenced real business in your niche, which is exactly what the assistant is looking for. Anyone selling a shortcut is selling either link spam that models increasingly ignore or fake mentions that can get you dropped.

On timing: the site and listing fixes help within weeks, as pages get re-crawled and assistants pull fresh web results. The deeper signal, being genuinely mentioned and reviewed across the web, builds over months, the same way real reputation always has. This is slow on purpose. It's also durable, because a competitor can't copy it overnight.

What's the simplest place to start this week?

Pick three things. Fix your business name and details so they're identical everywhere. Complete your Google Business Profile with real photos and a few reviews. Rewrite your homepage and one FAQ page in plain sentences that answer what customers actually ask. That trio covers consistency, presence, and legibility, the three things every assistant checks before it says a name.

This is also the gap Laspi's WordPress plugin is built to close: it writes SEO- and GEO-shaped articles for your site, grounded in your real business and structured the way assistants read, so the answers to your customers' questions actually exist on pages a model can cite. You still decide what's true about your business. It just makes sure that truth is written down clearly and often.

None of this is a trick, and that's the good news. You don't have to out-clever an algorithm. You have to be a real business that's easy to describe, easy to verify, and easy to find, in the words your customers use and in the places machines read. Do that consistently, and getting named in an AI answer stops being luck and starts being a byproduct of doing the boring things well.