How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT, for free

Type "best dentist near me" into ChatGPT, or "who should I call for a burst pipe in Austin", and you get a short list of named businesses with reasons. No ads, no map, no page two. If your business is not in that list, it does not exist for that customer.

Most businesses are not in the list. SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index, which looked at more than 350,000 business locations across 2,751 brands, found that ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of local business locations [1]. In restaurants alone, Uberall found 83% of locations entirely invisible in AI recommendations [2]. And the people asking are real: in DoorDash's 2026 survey of more than 3,000 US consumers, 22% had already used an AI tool to choose a restaurant [3].

The good news is that ChatGPT does not keep a secret ranking you have to buy into. It builds each answer from things it can read on the open web, and most of those things are free to fix. Here is what it reads, and what to do about it.

What ChatGPT actually reads

Search results, mostly from Bing. When ChatGPT needs current information, it searches the web. Microsoft announced in May 2023 that "Bing is coming to ChatGPT as the default search experience" [4]. That matters for a small business, because almost everyone optimises for Google and forgets Bing exists.

Its own crawler. OpenAI runs a crawler called OAI-SearchBot that, in OpenAI's words, "is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features". Sites that block it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" [5]. Many websites blocked every AI bot in 2024 and never looked again.

Plain HTML, not scripts. An analysis of 569 million crawler requests found that OpenAI's crawler fetches JavaScript files but does not execute them [6]. If your opening hours or your services only appear after a script runs, ChatGPT reads a blank page.

Directories, above all Yelp. BrightLocal ran 60,970 local checks in 2026 and found Yelp cited in 80% of all ChatGPT answers. The other directories ChatGPT leaned on most were TripAdvisor, OpenTable, the BBB, Angie's List, Trustpilot, The Infatuation, Yellow Pages, HomeAdvisor and Apple [7]. Yext, analysing 6.8 million citations, found that 48.73% of ChatGPT's citations came from third-party sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor and MapQuest [8].

Your own website, more than you think. The same Yext study found that for Gemini, 52.15% of citations came from the brand's own website [8]. The assistants are different, but every one of them reads your site when it is readable.

So the picture is simple. ChatGPT names the businesses whose facts it can find, read and confirm in more than one place. Here is how to become one of them.

1. Fix your Bing presence first

Google Business Profile matters for Google's own AI answers, where BrightLocal found it the most cited source [7]. But ChatGPT searches through Bing, so claim your free listing in Bing Places for Business. It can import your Google Business Profile, so this takes minutes, not an afternoon [9].

Then open Bing Webmaster Tools, add your site and submit your sitemap. If Bing has never indexed your site, ChatGPT cannot find it through search.

2. Let the crawler in, and give it plain text

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. If you see a line blocking OAI-SearchBot, or a blanket block on every bot, remove it. OpenAI documents three separate bots: OAI-SearchBot for search results, ChatGPT-User for when a user asks ChatGPT to open a page, and GPTBot for model training [5]. You can block training and still allow search. Most businesses want search.

Then check that your key facts are in the page's HTML, not drawn in by a script after load. The quick test: open your page, choose "View page source", and search for your phone number and your opening hours. If they are not there, your web developer needs to render them on the server.

3. One clear page per service and place

An assistant quotes exact sentences. "Emergency AC repair in Miami, open weekends, licensed and insured, call-out within two hours" is a sentence it can use. "We offer a wide range of services" is not.

Write one page per thing people ask for, in the words they use: "Invisalign in Leeds", "same-day crown", "pizza delivery open until midnight". Put the city, the hours, the price range if you have one, and the licence number in the first paragraph, as text.

4. Keep every listing identical

ChatGPT confirms a business by finding the same facts in several places. One wrong phone number or a different closing time on Yelp than on your site is a reason to skip you. Go through Google, Bing, Yelp, the BBB, Facebook, TripAdvisor or OpenTable if you are a restaurant, Angie's List or HomeAdvisor if you are a contractor, and make the name, address, phone, hours and website exactly the same, character for character. Yext's advice from its citation study is the same: listings that are "accurate, consistent, and complete across every platform" [8].

Yelp deserves an hour of its own, because of that 80% figure. Claim the profile, fill every field, add the services and the hours, and reply to reviews.

5. Reviews that say what you did

Assistants quote reviews that answer the customer's question. "Fixed our boiler the same afternoon and charged what they quoted" tells ChatGPT three things it can use. "Great service!!!" tells it nothing. When you ask for a review, ask the customer to say what they came in for and how it went. Spread them across Google and Yelp, not only one.

6. Add the markup that spells it out

Structured data is a small block of code that tells a machine "this is a Dentist, here is the address, phone, opening hours and service area". Schema.org defines a LocalBusiness type with specific versions such as Dentist, Restaurant, Plumber, LegalService and LodgingBusiness, and properties such as address, telephone, openingHours, areaServed and aggregateRating [10]. Most website builders have a setting for it; a developer can add it in an hour. It removes the guessing.

How to see where you stand

You cannot manage what you have not measured, and the honest measurement is the one your customers see: the actual answer, in your city, on each assistant.

Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok and Perplexity the three questions your customers ask, with your city in the question. Note who is named, in what order, and which sites each answer cites. Those cited sites are your to-do list: they are where the assistant got its information, and where yours is missing.

Doing that by hand for five assistants, every month, is tedious. SeeRanked runs it for you. The free check at seeranked.com/check takes two minutes to set up: your business, your city, the questions. It then asks all five assistants and shows who gets named, in what position, and which sources the answers cite, with the fixes in priority order. Setting it up needs no account; the report needs a free sign-up, no card.

None of this guarantees a position, and anyone who promises one is guessing. There is no paid placement inside an AI answer. What there is, is a list of facts the assistants read, and a business that gets them right in every place they look is the one that gets named.

References

1. SOCi, 2026 Local Visibility Index, press release of 10 March 2026: "ChatGPT currently recommends just 1.2% of all local business locations." natlawreview.com
2. Uberall, "Fast Food, Faster Discovery: The 2026 GEO Playbook for Multi-Location QSRs", 8 May 2026. uberall.com
3. DoorDash, 2026 Restaurant Industry Trends Report, as reported by Food On Demand, 20 May 2026. foodondemand.com
4. Microsoft, "Microsoft Build brings AI tools to the forefront for developers", 23 May 2023. blogs.microsoft.com
5. OpenAI, "Overview of OpenAI crawlers" (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, GPTBot). developers.openai.com
6. Vercel, "The rise of the AI crawler", 17 December 2024. vercel.com
7. BrightLocal, "Top sources and directories for local AI search", 26 August 2026. brightlocal.com
8. Yext, "AI visibility in 2025: how Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity cite brands", 29 October 2025. yext.com
9. Microsoft Bing, "Introducing the New Bing Places for Business", October 2025. blogs.bing.com
10. Schema.org, LocalBusiness. schema.org