How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business?

Why the usual advice does not work

The usual advice is to do SEO harder: more keywords, more backlinks, a faster site. That advice is aimed at a ranking, and an AI assistant does not consult a ranking. HubSpot's own measurement found that only about 40% of what assistants cite comes from page one of Google; the other 60% comes from review platforms, directories, forums and pages that rank nowhere. You can be first on Google for "plumber Tampa" and absent from ChatGPT's answer to "who should I call about a leaking water heater in Tampa?" Many businesses are exactly that.

The reason is mechanical. When a customer asks an assistant for a recommendation, it does a search of its own, reads a handful of pages, and composes one answer. It names the business whose page it could read and whose claims it could corroborate. If your reviews live only inside Google's widget and your website is a single image with a phone number, there is nothing for it to read, and it names whoever gave it something.

Why this matters more than the ranking did

A search visitor arrives with ten tabs open. An AI visitor arrives with one name. HubSpot measured that the second kind converts at five to thirteen times the rate of the first. So the question is not whether AI answers are a large share of your traffic yet; it is that the share you get converts like a referral from a friend. Being the name in that answer is worth more per visit than any position on a results page.

The four things an assistant reads

Across every check we run, the same inputs decide the answer, in roughly this order.

• Reviews it can parse. Not a star count in a widget: the text, the dates, the reviewer, the service, published as Review schema on a page it can fetch.

• A business record it can trust. LocalBusiness schema with your name, phone, address or service area, hours and services, matching what Google, Yelp and Bing say about you.

• Answer-first pages. A question a customer would ask, a one-sentence answer, then the detail. Assistants quote pages that are already shaped like answers.

• Presence where it already reads. For most trades that is Google Business Profile, Yelp, BBB, the trade directories, and increasingly Reddit threads. If the assistant's habitual sources have never heard of you, your own site is doing all the work alone.

The one most businesses are missing

It is the first one. Almost every business with customers has reviews; almost none has them published anywhere an assistant can read them as data. Google shows reviews to humans inside a widget that a crawler cannot parse. The reviews are the most credible thing an assistant could learn about you, and they are locked in the one place it cannot see. An AI-readable review site is nothing more exotic than unlocking them: the same public reviews, attributed, on a domain you own, marked up as the structured record the models are built to read.

How to know it is working

Do not watch traffic; watch the answer. Re-ask the same questions on the same assistants every month and record two numbers: branded (asked about you by name, were you described accurately?) and unbranded (asked who to call, were you named at all?). The branded number moves first, usually within weeks, because an assistant that finds a clean record about you will use it. The unbranded number is the one that brings in customers, and it moves as your record starts appearing in the sources the assistant already trusts. Our free check runs exactly this measurement for you, and the subscription re-runs it every Monday.