How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and AI Search
People are asking AI assistants for local recommendations instead of searching. Here is what actually decides whether your business gets named, and what you can do about it this week.
A growing number of people now ask an AI assistant for a recommendation rather than searching and scrolling. “Who is a good locksmith in Round Rock.” “Find me a mobile mechanic who comes to you.” They get back two or three names and they call one.
If your business is not one of the names, you never knew the conversation happened. There is no impression to see and no click that did not occur. This is the part that makes it worth paying attention to now rather than later.
The short answer: AI assistants mostly recommend businesses they can understand and verify. That means being clearly described in plain language, being consistent everywhere you appear, and being independently corroborated by reviews and mentions. Most of this overlaps with good ordinary SEO, which is the good news.
How these systems actually choose
Broadly, three things.
What they were trained on, which is a large amount of the public web up to a point in time. You cannot influence this retroactively, only going forward.
What they can look up live, which for most assistants now means a search, then reading the results. This is where you have real leverage.
What they can parse confidently. This is the underrated one. If a page states plainly that you are a mobile mechanic serving Round Rock and Georgetown, open until nine, and that you do pre-purchase inspections, a model can use that. If the same information is spread across a hero image, a PDF, and a phone number rendered as a graphic, it cannot.
What to do
1. Answer the question in the first paragraph.
Old SEO writing built up to the point. That does not survive this. If the page is about what a pre-purchase inspection costs, say what it costs in the first two sentences, then explain.
Assistants extract answers. A page that buries its answer under four hundred words of preamble loses to one that leads with it, even if the buried version is better written.
2. Use plain, literal language about what you do and where.
Clever taglines do not survive extraction. “Keeping Austin moving since 2019” tells a model nothing. “Mobile mechanic serving Austin, Round Rock, and Georgetown” tells it everything. Put the literal version somewhere on the page and keep the clever one if you like it.
3. Add structured data.
Schema markup is the machine-readable version of your business facts. It is a block of code that states your name, address, phone, hours, services, and area served in a format built to be parsed rather than read.
You do not have to hand write it. Most website platforms have a plugin, and Google publishes a free testing tool. This is one of the highest-leverage hours you can spend, because it removes all ambiguity about who and where you are.
4. Be consistent everywhere.
Your name, address and phone number should be byte-identical across your website, Google Business Profile, Facebook, Yelp, and every directory. Not similar. Identical.
Conflicting information makes a system less confident about recommending you, and low confidence means it names someone else.
5. Get reviews, and reply to them.
Reviews are independent corroboration, which is exactly what these systems look for. They also contain the words real customers use about your work, in their language rather than your marketing language.
Replying matters more than people expect. It demonstrates an active business, and it doubles the text associated with your listing.
6. Publish the questions you get asked.
The note on your phone of every question a customer asks before hiring you is the best content plan you will ever have. Each one is a page. Each page is a chance to be the source that gets quoted.
7. Do not block the crawlers, and consider an llms.txt.
Check your robots file is not accidentally blocking AI crawlers. Some sites block them by default and the owner has no idea.
You can also add a plain text file at /llms.txt describing your business, services, and what you should be cited for. Support is not universal, it is not a magic trick, and I would not spend long on it. But it takes twenty minutes and it costs nothing.
What does not work
Keyword stuffing, which was already dead and is deader here. Claiming to be the largest or the best without anything backing it, because unverifiable claims make you less citable rather than more. And AI-generated content published in bulk, which is both easy to detect and, more practically, indistinguishable from everything else generated the same way.
Do this yourself, or hire someone?
Do it yourself if: you want to fix your first paragraphs, make your name and address consistent everywhere, get reviews and reply to them, and start publishing the questions you get asked. That is most of the value and it is all genuinely doable alone.
Hire someone if: schema markup makes your eyes glaze over, you have a lot of pages to restructure, or you want this handled as part of ongoing work rather than as a project you will start and not finish. Structured data in particular is easy to get subtly wrong in a way that does nothing.
The overlap between this and ordinary good SEO is large. If you do the work properly for humans and search engines, you are most of the way there. If you want a look at where your business currently stands, book a call.
Tatiano Fishgrab has worked with 20+ industries: locksmiths, mechanics, solar companies, pest control, home builders, and more: producing documented results including 400 calls/month, about 150 mechanic leads/month, and 34× organic traffic growth.