How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

How to rank in ChatGPT starts with how it picks a contractor

When a homeowner in Garland types “who should I call for a slab leak,” ChatGPT doesn’t check a directory of paid listings. It answers in one of two ways.

For many local questions it searches the live web, reads a handful of pages, and writes a short answer with links. OpenAI says ChatGPT search draws on third-party search providers plus its own crawler. For other questions it answers from what the model already learned during training, which can be months out of date.

Either way, the result is a summary of what the web says about local businesses in your trade. If your site is hard to read, your phone number differs across listings, and nobody outside your own website mentions you, ChatGPT has little reason to pick you. The contractor it named instead usually isn’t gaming anything. The web simply has more to say about them.

One more thing to know: answers change with the wording, the person’s location, their chat history and the day. There’s no fixed “position one” in ChatGPT. You’re aiming to be named often, for the questions that lead to jobs.

Step 1: See what ChatGPT says about you today

Before you change anything, write down where you stand. Open a temporary chat so your own history doesn’t skew the answer, then ask the questions your customers ask:

• “Best [your trade] in [your city]”
• “Who does emergency [service] near [suburb] tonight?”
• “Is [your business name] any good?”

Save each answer with the date. Note who gets named, which sources ChatGPT links to, and whether anything it says about you is wrong: an old number, a city you don’t cover, a service you dropped. Those sources are your to-do list. If you want this done properly across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers, that’s what our AI visibility audit covers.

Step 2: Let ChatGPT read your website

This is the most common silent problem we find. OpenAI’s crawler documentation explains that OAI-SearchBot is the bot that finds pages for ChatGPT search, and that sites which block it may not appear in ChatGPT’s search answers. A separate bot, GPTBot, collects training data. You can block GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot.

Check three things, or have your web person check them:

1. Your robots.txt file (yoursite.com/robots.txt) doesn’t disallow OAI-SearchBot.
2. Your firewall or security plugin isn’t blocking AI crawlers by default. Some hosting and bot-protection tools now offer a one-click “block AI bots” setting, and it’s easy to switch on without realizing it covers search.
3. Your key facts are in plain text, not only inside images or a phone-number graphic. A crawler can’t read a JPEG of your service area map.

While you’re at it, set up Bing Webmaster Tools and claim your Bing Places listing. They’re free, and a business that’s invisible to Bing is missing from one of the bigger search indexes these tools can draw on.

Step 3: Make your business facts match everywhere

ChatGPT is cautious about recommending a business when sources disagree. If your Google Business Profile says you serve Plano and Frisco, Yelp says Dallas only, and your website lists a phone number you retired in 2022, you look like three different companies.

Pick one exact version of your name, phone, website, hours, service area and core services. Then make every listing match: Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, the BBB, Nextdoor, Angi and any trade association or manufacturer dealer locator you’re on. Close duplicate listings rather than leaving them to drift.

Step 4: Publish pages that answer hiring questions

When ChatGPT searches, it’s looking for a page that answers the exact question. A homepage that says “quality service you can trust” gives it nothing to quote. A page titled “Water heater replacement in Richardson” that says which brands you install, whether you haul off the old tank, how soon you can come out and whether you’re licensed gives it plenty.

Lead each page with a direct one or two sentence answer, then the detail. Name the suburbs you actually serve. Skip the fifty cloned city pages: they don’t help in Google, and they give ChatGPT nothing new to say.

Step 5: Earn reviews that describe the work

A wall of five-star reviews that say “great job” tells an AI very little. A review that says “they replaced our 20-year-old water heater in Lake Highlands the same afternoon” tells it what you do, where, and how fast.

You can’t script reviews, and you shouldn’t. But you can ask at the right moment and make it easy: a text with a direct review link right after the job, with a line like “if you mention what we fixed, it helps other homeowners find us.” Reply to every review, good or bad, in plain words. Spread your asks across Google and at least one other platform homeowners use, since ChatGPT doesn’t only read Google.

Step 6: Get other people to mention you

This is the slow part, and the part that separates the businesses ChatGPT names from the ones it doesn’t. AI answers lean on what other sites say about you. Useful mentions for a DFW contractor include:

• Manufacturer and supplier dealer pages (Carrier, Trane, GAF, Generac and the like, if you hold a dealer status).
• Trade associations, the local chamber and city or HOA vendor lists.
• Local news coverage, for example after a hail storm or a community project you sponsored.
• Genuine recommendations in Reddit threads, Nextdoor posts and Facebook groups. Never post fake ones; moderators and homeowners spot them, and it backfires.
• “Best of” lists on credible local sites, where you earned the spot.

You don’t need hundreds of these. A steady handful of real, specific mentions beats a pile of paid directory links nobody reads.

Step 7: Track what changes

ChatGPT doesn’t give you a dashboard, so build your own picture:

• Re-run your Step 1 questions once a month, same wording, and compare who’s named.
• Check your analytics for visits from chatgpt.com. Links clicked inside ChatGPT search often carry a chatgpt.com source tag.
• Ask every caller how they found you, and add “ChatGPT or another AI app” as an option your office staff can tick.

How long does it take? Honestly, it varies. Fixes to your site and listings can show up in live-search answers fairly quickly once they’re crawled. What the model “remembers” from training changes only when a newer model ships. Anyone who quotes you a firm timeline is guessing.

What not to waste money on

• Prompt spam. Asking ChatGPT about yourself hundreds of times doesn’t train it to recommend you.
• Keyword-stuffed “AI pages.” Thin pages written for robots read as thin to a model, too.
• Fake reviews and sock-puppet posts. They break platform rules and can get your profile penalized.
• Magic files. You’ll hear that adding an llms.txt file gets you into ChatGPT. We haven’t seen OpenAI confirm it uses one. It’s harmless, but it’s not a strategy.

Most of this work overlaps with good local SEO, which is the point: how to get recommended by ChatGPT and how to climb Google Maps come down to the same signals. If you’re wondering whether you can just have ChatGPT write and run your SEO instead, we answer that in can ChatGPT do your SEO? And if you’d rather hand the whole thing off, contact us and we’ll show you what ChatGPT says about your business today.