How do I get ChatGPT and other AI assistants to recommend my business?
Nobody can promise it, not us and not anyone selling it. What you can do is make the true facts about your business easy to find and hard to misread, because that’s the material these assistants work from: your own website, your listings on Google and Yelp, your reviews, and other sites that mention you. It’s worth the effort. BrightLocal, which sells local-search software, found that 45% of consumers had used AI for local business recommendations in the past year. The work is mostly free and mostly yours to do.
What these assistants look at
When someone asks an AI assistant for a good place nearby, it builds an answer from whatever it can find about the businesses in the area. For two of them, the sources are on the record. Google’s Ask Maps answers from reviews, profile data and the business’s own website, as we explain in what happened to Q&A on your Google profile. Yelp’s assistant draws on reviews, page information and the business’s website. We don’t have a published source list for ChatGPT to point you to, so the safe bet is the same set of sources: what you say about yourself, what your listings say, what customers say, and what other sites say.
Two things follow. If those sources disagree, with an old address here and different hours there, an assistant has nothing solid to repeat about you. And if a fact appears nowhere, no assistant can tell anyone about it.
The owner’s checklist
- Same name, address and hours everywhere. Check your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, your website and any directory that lists you. Fix the stale ones, including an old phone number or a location you moved out of.
- A plain questions page on your own site, in your customers’ words. Write the questions the way people ask them on the phone: Do you work on weekends? Do you come to my neighborhood? Do you speak Spanish? How do I book? Answer each in a sentence or two. Say what you don’t do, too; that’s as useful to a customer as what you do.
- Real reviews from real customers. Ask every customer, the same way, with a plain link — not just the ones you expect to be happy. Never write fake reviews, never buy them, and never trade discounts for them. A recommendation built on fake praise sends you customers who feel misled the moment they arrive.
- Keep it current. Holiday hours, a new service, a new area: update the website and the listings the same day.
When it works, the phone has to be answered
A recommendation sends you a person who’s ready to buy, and that person’s next move is often a phone call. If the phone rings out, the recommendation did its job and you lost the result anyway. The next name the assistant gave gets the work. Before you put effort into being recommended, make sure someone, or some backup for your people, picks up during the hours you list.
And an honest edge: if your schedule is already full from regulars and referrals, this isn’t urgent. Clean listings and a clear website are good hygiene for any business, but they’re no emergency for a shop that’s turning work away.