How to get recommended by ChatGPT

How AI answers pick businesses

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI answers for the best dentist, plumber or lawyer nearby, the assistant does not guess. It searches the web first, reads a handful of pages, and names the businesses those pages point to. The pages it trusts most are rarely the business's own website. They are review sites, directories, local news and “best of” lists, and community discussions. Your own site matters, but it is one voice among many. That is the whole game: AI recommendations are a reputation contest fought on other people's websites, and the winner is usually the business with the most consistent, recent, third-party proof.

1. Let the crawlers in

AI search only knows what it can read. ChatGPT search relies on OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot, and other assistants have their own crawlers. If your robots.txt blocks them, or your site is a single image, a PDF, or a JavaScript app that renders nothing without a browser, the assistants see an empty page and move on. Check your robots.txt and allow the AI search crawlers by name. Make sure your key pages render as plain HTML with real text: your services, your prices, your hours, your service area, and your address. A page that a person can read in ten seconds is usually a page a crawler can read too.

2. Say the same thing everywhere

AI answers cross-check. If your Google profile says “Smith Family Dental”, Yelp says “Smith Dental”, and your website says “Smith Family Dentistry of Austin”, the assistant is less sure all three are the same business, and less likely to name any of them. Pick one exact business name, one address, one phone number, and one short description, and use them identically on your website, your Google Business Profile, every directory, and every social profile. The same goes for hours and services: if three sources disagree about whether you are open on Saturdays, the answer hedges, and hedging businesses do not get recommended.

3. Get listed where AI looks

Every category has its own shortlist of sources. For dentists it is Google reviews, Yelp, Healthgrades and Zocdoc. For lawyers it is Avvo, Justia and FindLaw. For plumbers it is Google, Yelp, Angi and HomeAdvisor. For restaurants it is Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor and OpenTable. For real estate agents it is Zillow and Realtor.com. Being absent from the top two or three sources for your trade is the single most common reason a good business never gets named. Claim every profile, fill it in completely, add real photos, and keep the details identical. A half-finished profile counts for less than a finished one, and an empty one counts for nothing.

4. Reviews are the currency

Reviews do two jobs at once. They tell the AI that real customers exist and liked you, and they give it fresh text to quote. Recent, genuine reviews tend to count for more than a pile of old ones, even at the same rating, because recency appears to be a signal the search trusts. Ask every happy customer, in person, right after the job is done: “Would you leave us a Google review? It takes a minute.” Make it easy with a link or a QR code at the counter. Reply to reviews, good and bad, in your own words. And never buy reviews or write your own: fake reviews are easy to spot, and getting caught costs more than having few.

5. Earn mentions you cannot buy

The strongest signal is someone else writing about you without being paid to. A local news story, a “best of” list, a neighborhood blog, a Reddit thread where a real customer recommends you by name. You cannot buy these, but you can earn them: do work worth mentioning, invite a local writer in, answer a reporter's question, sponsor one neighborhood event and let the organizer say so. A genuine mention on a trusted local site often helps more than many thin directory listings, because it is the kind of page AI answers love to cite.

6. Answer the questions customers actually ask

Your own site still matters, because it is where the assistant checks the details. Write pages that answer the exact questions people type: prices, hours, service area, insurance accepted, how long a job takes, who you are best for. Use the customers' own words, not industry jargon. A page titled “How much does a root canal cost in Austin?” will be cited more often than a page titled “Endodontic Services”. Keep it short, keep it true, and keep it current: an out-of-date menu or a price list from 2022 tells the AI your business is not paying attention.

7. Check, fix one thing, check again

AI answers change from run to run, so a single check is a snapshot, not a verdict. The useful habit is a loop: run a check, find the one source you are missing from or the one fix that matters most, fix it, and check again in a week or two. Do not try to fix everything at once. The businesses that climb are the ones that fix one real gap a week: a missing directory, five new reviews, one honest service page. Prisqo exists for exactly this loop. It does not query ChatGPT directly; it asks six buyer-style questions to one AI model with live web search and shows whether you were named, who was named instead, and which sources were cited. One report is $19, paid once, no account, no subscription. Run it, fix the biggest gap it shows, and run it again.

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