How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude

Some customers now skip the search box and ask an AI assistant instead: “Who's the best plumber near me?” “Where can I get my brows done on the Westside?” The assistant answers with a short list of names. If your business isn't on it, you never hear about the customer who asked.

There's no secret trick for getting on that list, and anyone who promises you a spot is guessing. But how assistants build their answers isn't a mystery. For current, local information, they search the web and read listings, reviews, directories and business websites. The basics still win. Here's what we'd do, in order.

How AI assistants decide who to recommend

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot each work a little differently, but for local questions they run web searches, read the pages and listings that come back and summarize them. OpenAI says ChatGPT search rewrites a question into targeted queries and sends them to third-party search providers, and its help pages name Bing among them. Google says a page only needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search to show up as a link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, with no special extra requirements.

So an assistant can only recommend you if it can find you, and it will describe you based on what the web says about you. The sections below cover the five things that shape that.

Let the crawlers in

AI companies and search engines send automated crawlers to read websites, and a small file on your site called robots.txt tells them what they may read. Security tools and hosting settings can block some crawlers without the owner knowing, so check yours. The names to look for:

• OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search) and GPTBot (OpenAI's training crawler)
• Claude-SearchBot (search results in Claude) and ClaudeBot (Anthropic's training crawler)
• PerplexityBot (Perplexity's search index)
• Googlebot and Bingbot (the classic search crawlers that much of this still depends on)

The search crawlers matter most for recommendations. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot won't appear in ChatGPT search answers. OpenAI and Anthropic treat training and search crawlers as separate settings, so you can block training and still allow search. Also keep your important information in plain text on the page, not only inside images.

Get indexed by Google and Bing

If search engines haven't indexed your site, the assistants that rely on them can't cite it. Three free tools cover most of this:

• Google Search Console: verify your site, submit your sitemap and confirm your key pages are indexed. Google reports clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode in the same Performance report as regular search.
• Bing Webmaster Tools: verify your site and submit your sitemap. Bing says Copilot relies on the same crawling, indexing and ranking foundation as Bing search, and its AI Performance report shows when Copilot and Bing's AI answers cite your pages.
• IndexNow: an open protocol, backed by Bing, that lets your site tell participating search engines when a page is added or changed instead of waiting for a crawl.

Many local businesses skip Bing because they assume their customers don't search there. That misses the point: Bing feeds Copilot, and OpenAI's own documentation names Bing as a search provider for ChatGPT. Bing Webmaster Tools is one of the fastest steps on this list.

Make your listings and reviews do the talking

When an assistant answers “who's the best,” it leans on what other people and other sites say about you. That means:

• A complete Google Business Profile: the right categories, hours, service area, services, photos and a description written for customers, not keywords.
• A steady flow of real reviews. Ask every customer, not only the ones you think were happy. Google's policy prohibits asking only for positive reviews and offering anything in exchange for a review, so never pay for reviews or reward people for leaving them.
• The same name, address and phone number everywhere. Mismatched details across your website, Google, Yelp and Facebook make it harder for a machine to be sure they all describe the same business.
• Listings on the directories assistants tend to cite: Yelp, Clutch for agencies and B2B services, the directories and associations in your industry and your local chamber of commerce.

Write pages that answer real questions

Assistants quote pages that answer the question directly. A “Services” page with a few bullet points gives them little to work with. A page that says what you do, for whom, where and what happens next gives them plenty. Name your city and the areas you serve in plain sentences. If customers keep asking whether you take walk-ins, work weekends or speak Spanish, answer that on your site.

Then add structured data. Schema.org markup, such as LocalBusiness with your name, address, phone, hours and service area, tells machines exactly what your page says. It doesn't guarantee anything, but it removes guesswork.

An llms.txt file is a cheap, optional extra: a short Markdown file at the root of your site that summarizes who you are and links to your key pages. Be clear about what it is. It's a proposed convention published at llmstxt.org, not a confirmed ranking factor for any assistant. It's worth the small effort, but don't pay extra for it on a promise of results.

Get mentioned around town

Assistants put more weight on businesses that other sources talk about. In El Paso, that means local news coverage, chamber listings and events, community sponsorships and local business roundups. Each mention is one more place where your name, your city and what you do appear together. You can't fake this part. Do things worth mentioning, and make sure your details are right when someone writes about you.

We did this work for our own site, h1collaborative.com: robots.txt rules that welcome search and AI crawlers by name, a sitemap, structured data, IndexNow, an llms.txt fact sheet and pages built around the questions owners ask us. Every step here also helps classic search, so none of it is wasted.

The honest summary

No one controls what ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude says, and anyone who guarantees a recommendation is selling something they can't deliver. What you control is whether assistants can read your site, whether search engines have indexed it, whether your listings are complete and consistent, whether real customers are leaving reviews and whether your pages answer the questions people actually ask. Do those well and you give every assistant good reasons to name you.

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