5 Ways to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Other AI Tools

1. Don't lock the door on AI

None of the rest matters if AI tools can't read your site. It happens more often than you'd think, usually by accident.

Type your domain followed by /robots.txt into a browser. If you see "Disallow" next to names like OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot or Bingbot, you're telling those tools to stay out. Bingbot matters more than it looks, because Bing's index feeds several AI assistants.

Then check the dashboard of your host, website builder or firewall. Several now offer a one-click "block AI bots" switch, and some turn it on by default. If you want to be recommended, make sure it's off for the search and answer bots. Whether you also allow training bots is a separate choice, and it's yours to make.

This takes ten minutes, and it's the most common problem I see.

2. Say what you do in plain words

AI tools read pages the way a busy person skims them. They look for a clear, direct statement they can repeat with confidence.

Open your homepage and your main service pages. Within the first couple of sentences, can a stranger tell: What you sell or do; Who it's for; Where you operate, if location matters; and roughly what it costs, if you can share that.

If the answer is buried under a slogan, or lives only in an image or a PDF price list, write it out as plain text. "We do payroll and bookkeeping for restaurants in Denver, starting at $300 a month" beats "Your financial partner for growth" every time, for people and for machines.

While you're there, turn the questions customers really ask you into headings with short answers right underneath. Pull them from your inbox and your reviews, not your imagination. A handful of real questions is worth more than a long list of invented ones. If your site builder or SEO plugin can add basic schema markup (LocalBusiness, Organization, FAQPage), switch it on and make sure it matches what the page says.

3. Tell the same story everywhere

AI tools don't trust one source. They piece together an answer from your site, your listings, review sites and anything else they find. When those disagree, you look less certain, and less certain businesses get mentioned less.

Make a short list of everywhere you appear: Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp or your industry's directories, and your social profiles. Check that your name, address, phone, website, hours and description line up. Kill or fix old listings from a previous address or phone number.

It's dull work. It's also some of the most useful hours you'll spend on this.

4. Give AI a reason to trust you

When an AI picks which businesses to name, it leans on what other people say about you. You can't buy that, but you can earn it steadily.

Reviews: Ask every happy customer, with a direct link. Reply to reviews, good and bad, like a real person would. Mentions on sites people respect: Your local business association, a trade group, a partner's "who we work with" page, a podcast in your niche, a quote in a local news story. A real About page: Who runs the business, how long you've done it, and any licenses or credentials that matter in your field. Real photos beat stock ones.

One mention on a site people actually read does more than dozens of throwaway directory links. And keep your key pages current. If an AI finds last year's prices or an old holiday schedule, it may repeat it. A quarterly 30-minute review of your main pages fixes that.

5. Measure it, or you're guessing

This is the step most people skip, and it's the one that tells you whether steps one through four worked.

The manual way: write down five to ten questions a customer would ask, like "best [your service] in [your city]" or "[your business] vs [competitor]." Ask them in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google, and note whether you're mentioned, whether the facts are right, and which sites get cited instead of you. Those cited sites are a to-do list. They show you where AI is getting its information.

The catch is that answers change, they vary between tools, and doing this by hand every few weeks gets old fast. That's why we built the DiscoSEO AI Citation Tracker. You give it your site and the phrases you care about, and it checks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Meta AI and Google AI Overviews mention you, then keeps tracking it so you can see whether your fixes are paying off.

Two other cheap signals are worth watching too. In your analytics, look for referral visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and similar sites. And add "ChatGPT or another AI tool" as an option on your "how did you hear about us?" form.

Start this week

If you only have an afternoon, do this: check your robots.txt and AI-bot settings, rewrite the first two sentences of your homepage so they say exactly what you do, and fix any listing that has the wrong hours or phone number.

If you want a full picture of what to fix first, the $99 DiscoSEO audit gives you a ranked list of SEO and GEO fixes for your site, with your money back within 30 days if it doesn't help.

And if you want to know whether AI is recommending you, or your competitors, try the AI Citation Tracker. For $49 a month it checks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Meta AI and Google AI Overviews for your phrases, so you stop guessing and start seeing where you stand.