How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

AI assistants answer a customer's question by pulling from sources they can parse and verify. If your site buries the basics in vague marketing copy, or your name, services, and area are inconsistent across the web, the AI has nothing solid to cite. So it recommends a competitor it can read more easily.

The on-site fixes are concrete. Write content that answers the real questions customers ask, in plain language, with the answer first. Add structured data (schema) that labels your business, services, service area, and reviews, so machines, not just people, understand the page. Keep your profile, site, and listings telling the same story. Allow the AI crawlers to read your site.

There is also an off-site half, and it is bigger than most owners think. Ahrefs studied 1.4 million prompts. About 88 percent of ChatGPT's citations came from pages that already rank in Google. So the assistants mostly quote what already ranks: review sites, directories, community threads, and best-of lists. Get your business named in those places, and you show up in every answer that quotes them.

Do the assistants differ? A little, and it helps to know how. ChatGPT leans on Bing and on pages that already rank. Perplexity crawls the web with its own bot and cites its sources right in the answer. Gemini leans on Google and your Business Profile. Claude reads what its crawler can reach, so let it in. One playbook covers all four.

This is what AEO, answer engine optimization, means in practice, and it overlaps heavily with good local SEO. A Local Marketing Score checks your AI-search visibility alongside your Google presence. So you can see whether the assistants can actually find you today.