How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT

Someone asks ChatGPT for a product recommendation. Your competitor gets mentioned. You do not. You Google your own company name and you rank fine, so why does ChatGPT ignore you?

Because ChatGPT does not search the web the way Google does. It synthesises answers from its training data, from pages it can access, and from structured information it can parse. The rules for showing up in AI answers are different from the rules for showing up in Google results. The field is called AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), and it is growing fast.

Here is how it works and what you can do about it.

How AI Answer Engines Choose What to Recommend

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews all work differently under the hood, but they share a few patterns in how they decide what to mention:

1. They favour sources they can quote with confidence. If your business has clear, structured information on your website (what you do, who you serve, what makes you different), the AI can extract and restate it. If your site is vague marketing copy with no specifics, the AI has nothing to work with.

2. They look for consensus across sources. If your business is mentioned on multiple independent sites (directories, reviews, articles, forums), the AI treats that as a signal that you are established. A business mentioned only on its own website is weaker.

3. They prefer recent, well-structured content. Schema markup, clear headings, FAQ sections, and concise answers to common questions give the AI material it can use directly.

4. They avoid sources that look like SEO spam. Pages stuffed with keywords, AI-generated content that says nothing, and sites with no real substance get filtered out. The AI is trained to be helpful, and helpful means citing sources that actually answer the question.

A Practical Process to Improve Your AI Visibility

Step 1: Test what AI says about you right now

Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Ask them the questions your customers would ask. "What is the best [your category] in [your area]?" "Who does [your service] for [your audience]?" Note whether you appear, where you appear, and who your competitors are in the answers.

This is your baseline. You cannot improve what you do not measure.

Step 2: Fix your structured data

Make sure your website has schema markup for your business type. At minimum: Organization or LocalBusiness schema with your name, address, phone, website, and description. If you sell products, add Product schema. If you have reviews, add Review or AggregateRating schema.

Google's Structured Data Markup Helper can generate this for you, or you can use a tool like Schema.org's validator to check what you already have.

Step 3: Write clear, quotable answers to common questions

Think about the questions your customers ask. Write a FAQ page that answers each one in two or three sentences. Be specific. "We help small marketing teams in the UK set up AI workflows for reporting, attribution and lead follow-up" is quotable. "We deliver innovative marketing solutions tailored to your needs" is not.

AI models extract sentences they can restate. If your sentences are clear and self-contained, they are more likely to be used.

Step 4: Get mentioned on other sites

This is the hardest part and the most important. AI models look for consensus. If you are mentioned on your own site plus three directories plus two industry articles, you are more visible than a competitor mentioned only on their own site.

Practical things that work:

• Get listed on relevant directories (not generic ones, ones your customers actually use)
• Write guest posts on sites your audience reads
• Get reviewed on platforms where reviews matter for your category
• Participate in forums and communities where your customers ask questions

Each mention on an independent site is a signal.

Step 5: Make your content easy to crawl

Ensure your site loads fast, has a clean sitemap, and does not block AI crawlers in robots.txt. Some sites block GPTBot and other AI crawlers thinking it protects their content. It also makes you invisible to AI search.

Step 6: Monitor and repeat

Check what ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity say about your business every month. Track whether you appear more or less. If a competitor suddenly shows up where they did not before, figure out what changed. Did they get a press mention? Did they add structured data? Did they publish a page that directly answers the question?

The Quicker Option

If you want to know exactly where you stand across Google, Maps, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, compared against your three nearest competitors, I do a done-for-you audit that covers all of this. It is £495, delivered in 48 hours, and comes with a 30-minute walkthrough call where I tell you exactly what to fix first. See andrewbuildsthings.com/audit.

If you want to do it yourself, the same methodology is available as a skill file for £7. You run it yourself on Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini. See andrewbuildsthings.com/toolkit.

The point is: AI search is not going away. Every month you ignore it, your competitors are getting harder to displace.