How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT
Customers can now ask an AI assistant for a recommendation instead of scrolling a list of links. Here is what makes an assistant name a business, what you control on your own site, and what takes months off it.
By Reidel, Studio Reidel · Updated
The short answer
Assistants name businesses they can read and trust. On your site that means the words in the HTML, structured data that says who you are, what you sell and where, plain answers to the questions people ask, and dates that tell the truth. Off your site it means a verified Google Business Profile, real reviews, and other sites mentioning you, and those take months.
What you control on your own site
- Words in the page itself. Text that only appears after JavaScript runs is text some AI crawlers never see.
- Structured data: a short, machine-readable statement of your business, your services, your prices if you publish them, and where you work.
- Plain answers. Pages shaped like the questions people type, each answered in its first sentence, so an assistant can quote it without guessing.
- Honest dates. A last-updated date that moves only when the words do, because Google has said it ignores a date it finds unreliable.
- An llms.txt, a plain summary of the business written for AI crawlers. It is a small extra rather than the main event.
What happens off your site
A verified Google Business Profile, with your category, your hours, your area and a link to the site. For local questions it matters more than anything on the page.
Real reviews from real customers, never bought and never written for them.
Mentions on other sites: directories, local listings, the pages of businesses you work with. Assistants trust a business that other sources describe the same way.
Bing, too. Microsoft's Copilot answers from Bing's index, so verifying the site in Bing Webmaster Tools is worth the few minutes it takes.
What nobody can promise
A top spot, in Google or in an assistant's answer, because nobody controls either. What can be built is the part a business does control. For a brand-new site, give that three to six months before judging it.
This site is the sample
Everything on the first list is on this site, so you can check the work before paying for it: the llms.txt, the structured data in the page source, and the date at the foot of every page, which moves only when that page's words do.
What it costs
On a site we build, the technical search setup comes with every tier, and the AI-answer setup from the ₱25,000 tier. On a site you already have, it is ₱6,000 to set up, then ₱3,500 a month. What the search work covers.