How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

How does ChatGPT find businesses to recommend?

When ChatGPT searches the web for an answer, it can only use the pages it can reach. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says its search crawler is called OAI-SearchBot, and that a site has to allow it in robots.txt to appear in ChatGPT’s search answers. When we asked ChatGPT “How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?” on October 6, 2026, both of its answers cited OpenAI’s help center and no other source.

For local questions, ChatGPT often shows the businesses it names as map cards. Google’s local map, which showed three businesses for 7 of our 8 Tampa questions, is built from Google Business Profiles, so your listings matter alongside your website. In our check, the ChatGPT answers that recommended businesses named between four and ten each.

Do Google’s AI tools and Perplexity work the same way?

Google’s AI Overviews draw on Google’s own search index, so the usual work of ranking in Google search matters here too. Google showed an AI Overview for all 15 questions in our check. For the general questions, those overviews cited reddit.com and linkedin.com more often than any company’s own site.

Perplexity has its own crawler, PerplexityBot, which needs the same access in robots.txt. We got one answer from Perplexity before it asked us to sign in. That answer listed nine sources, among them two agency directories and a LinkedIn page, so the rest of our check covers ChatGPT and Google.

What did ChatGPT and Google answer when we checked?

On October 6, 2026 we asked ChatGPT and Google 15 questions while logged out: 13 that a business owner looking for help might ask, and 2 about our own name. ChatGPT answered each question twice and Google once.

The answers about our own name taught us the most. Our site ranked first on Google for “What does Colorful Systems AI consulting do?”, and the AI Overview above it still drew on a LinkedIn profile. Step 7 below comes from that.

What are the steps to get recommended by ChatGPT?

Work through them in order. The first step decides whether ChatGPT can read your site at all.

1. Let AI crawlers reach your site. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and check that it allows the AI search crawlers: OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, PerplexityBot for Perplexity and Claude-SearchBot for Claude, plus Google’s own Googlebot. Ours allows all of them.
2. Set up your Google Business Profile and fill in every field that applies, then copy the same details to Bing Places and Apple Business Connect. Google’s local map is built from these profiles.
3. Keep your business name, phone number and service area identical everywhere they appear: your site, every listing, directories and social profiles. Write them down once and copy from that note each time.
4. Write one page for each question customers ask you, and answer it in the first two sentences. This guide does the same: the answer to its title is the first paragraph, in 56 words.
5. Add structured data for your business details and your common questions, in the schema.org format Google reads. This page carries Article, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList data.
6. Earn mentions where AI tools look: customer reviews, the directories in your field, LinkedIn, Reddit and local press. For the general questions in our check, Google’s AI Overviews cited reddit.com and linkedin.com more than any company site.
7. Make your own LinkedIn and other profiles say what your site says. In our check, Google’s AI Overview described our business from a LinkedIn profile instead of our own site.
8. Check what ChatGPT and Google say about you every month, logged out, asking each question at least twice. The answers vary: ChatGPT’s two answers to “AI automation agency Tampa” listed six and eight businesses, and only five appeared in both. Our free AI visibility check runs a quick version for you: three questions, each asked three times.

What doesn’t work?

• Buying links. A paid link on a site that has nothing to do with your trade tells AI tools nothing true about your business.
• Stuffing keywords. A page that repeats “best roofer in Tampa” in every paragraph is harder for a person to read and gives an AI tool nothing worth quoting.
• Pages written for robots instead of people. AI tools quote pages that answer a question in plain words.
• Anyone who guarantees a recommendation. No one controls what ChatGPT says. When we asked it how to get recommended, ChatGPT cited OpenAI’s help center to say placement isn’t guaranteed.

Can someone do this for my business?

Colorful Systems does, as part of every customer funnel we build. We check what ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews say about you, fix your Google Business Profile and listings, rewrite the pages that matter, and report every month on where AI recommends you. The funnel takes about four to six weeks to build.

To start, book a 30-minute call with Josh. Before we meet, we build a free demo and a short plan for your business.