Imagine a potential customer asking ChatGPT:
“Which accountancy firms in Hampshire specialise in helping small businesses?”
Or:
“Can you recommend a reliable commercial cleaning company near Southampton?”
Your competitors might appear in the response while your business is absent.
It’s understandable to wonder why.
But there is no guaranteed method for getting ChatGPT to recommend a business. The useful question is what information ChatGPT can access, how clearly your business is represented and what evidence may support its inclusion in a relevant answer.
How does ChatGPT find businesses?
ChatGPT can answer questions using model knowledge and, where available, information retrieved through search and other sources.
When search is involved, the system may retrieve relevant webpages and provide citations or links.
A response is not necessarily a straightforward ranking of businesses. It may reflect the wording of the question, available sources, geographic context and other factors.
That means a business can be well established in conventional Google results without appearing consistently in ChatGPT answers.
It also means a single ChatGPT response should not be treated as a definitive measurement of visibility.
Seven practical ways to improve your foundations
1. Make sure your website can be discovered
Check whether important public pages are accessible and whether crawler restrictions are intentional.
OpenAI identifies OAI-SearchBot as a crawler associated with ChatGPT search. It is distinct from GPTBot, which is associated with potential model training.
Businesses can make separate decisions about these crawler permissions.
Allowing access does not guarantee that ChatGPT will retrieve, cite or recommend your content.
2. Explain your services clearly
Your homepage and service pages should make it easy to establish:
- What your business does.
- Who your services are designed for.
- Which locations you serve.
- What problems you solve.
- How customers can evaluate or contact you.
Avoid relying entirely on broad statements such as “innovative solutions” or “industry-leading expertise”.
Specific information is more useful to customers and easier to interpret.
3. Answer real customer questions
Consider what a prospective customer needs to know before choosing a provider.
A commercial cleaning company, for example, might explain which property types it serves, how site assessments work, what is included in a contract and how specialist cleaning requirements are handled.
An accountancy firm might explain the types of clients it supports, the services included in different arrangements and how onboarding works.
These details help prospective customers make informed comparisons.
4. Keep public business information consistent
Check that your website, relevant directories and business profiles describe your company accurately.
Inconsistent names, service descriptions, locations or contact information can create confusion.
Consistency is particularly important for businesses serving defined geographic areas.
5. Build genuine credibility
Independent information may help prospective customers and search systems evaluate a business.
Relevant examples include professional memberships, credible editorial coverage, independent reviews, recognised qualifications and verifiable experience.
These signals should reflect real activity.
Buying artificial reviews, manufacturing endorsements or placing irrelevant links is not a credible long-term visibility strategy.
6. Maintain strong conventional SEO
AI search does not make technical SEO redundant.
Accessible pages, coherent internal linking, useful content, accurate metadata and appropriate structured data remain worthwhile.
For Google’s AI search experiences, Google explicitly recommends continuing to follow established SEO best practices.
7. Measure visibility before making major changes
Start by identifying a representative group of questions customers might ask.
Record the answers returned, which businesses appear, whether your company is described accurately and which sources are cited.
Repeat observations over time using a consistent method.
Look for patterns rather than reacting to an individual result.
Why might ChatGPT recommend a competitor instead?
Several explanations are possible.
A competitor may have clearer public information, stronger relevant third-party coverage or content that better addresses the question.
Alternatively, the difference may reflect the particular sources retrieved, the wording of the prompt or variation between responses.
It is important not to assume that one observed omission proves a specific technical or authority problem.
A useful investigation compares what the systems show with what is actually available online.
Do you need an llms.txt file?
An llms.txt file is a proposed way of presenting information to language-model-oriented systems.
However, it is not an established requirement for appearing in ChatGPT recommendations, and there is insufficient evidence to treat it as a universal ranking or citation factor.
Google has explicitly stated that it does not require AI-specific text files for inclusion in its AI search features.
For most small businesses, fixing important content, accessibility and credibility problems should take priority over speculative additions.
Can you pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?
Businesses should not confuse advertising with organic recommendations.
Paid placements, where offered, are a separate commercial mechanism from improving the organic discoverability and credibility of a business.
No third-party SEO or GEO consultancy can purchase a guaranteed organic recommendation from ChatGPT.
Be cautious of providers claiming otherwise.
What should you do first?
Rather than making dozens of changes, conduct a focused review.
Choose one commercially important service and identify the questions customers might ask when comparing providers.
Then examine your website, relevant public profiles, competitor information and the responses returned by the AI search platforms you want to understand.
Identify the clearest information gaps and address those first.
Finally, review the results over time without assuming that every change in an AI answer was caused by your work.
The aim is not to manipulate ChatGPT into recommending your business. It is to make your business easier to discover, understand and evaluate when a recommendation would genuinely be relevant.