Getting ChatGPT to recommend your business

One of the three surfaces we count, and the one most likely to send you traffic you can see.

What we can say

ChatGPT is in our counted set. We sample it directly, three runs per question, signed out, in a fresh session with no history, location set explicitly and recorded.

It also refers live traffic. Where a business is being recommended, referral visits show up in analytics, which makes this the one AI surface where the effect is partly independently observable.

What appears to move it

Entity clarity first. The same foundation as everything else, a business it cannot confidently identify is one it avoids naming.

Presence on the sources it consults. Much of what it knows about your category comes from third-party surfaces rather than your site.

Specific, checkable content on your own domain. Generic advice is uncitable because it is available everywhere; there is no reason to attribute it to you.

Review substance. The substance of the reviews, not only the star average.

What we will not claim

That any technique guarantees a recommendation. The ranking logic is not published, it changes without notice, and anyone describing a reliable method is describing a product rather than an observation.

We also will not claim a single screenshot proves anything. Around one in ten surfaced domains differs between identical runs minutes apart, which is why we run three times and report splits as unstable.

Read in order, or jump

Twelve chapters, in the order the work has to happen. The first four are the spine; the platform chapters at the end include two surfaces we deliberately do not score, and say why.

01 How AI search picks local businesses 02 Eligibility: can AI even see your site? 03 Robots.txt: block AI crawlers or allow them? 04 Measuring AI visibility honestly 05 Entity foundations for local businesses 06 Reviews as AI input 07 Citation surfaces: where AI engines look 08 Getting ChatGPT to recommend your business 09 Showing up in Perplexity 10 Showing up in Google AI Overviews 11 Showing up in Gemini 12 Copilot, and why we don't sample it

See where you actually stand

A free Visibility Check runs the measurement described in this guide on your own business.

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