How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Google's AI Answers

Customers Are Asking AI Now

A few years ago, a customer looking for a plumber, an accountant or a web developer typed a search and scrolled through ten links. Today, more of them ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot or Google, and read an AI-written answer at the top.

That answer often names a few businesses or links to a few pages. If yours is not one of them, the customer may never see your website at all.

You cannot pay to be in those answers, and nobody, including me, can guarantee that an AI tool will recommend you. Which sources it picks depends on the question, the user, and systems that OpenAI and Google do not fully publish. What you can control is whether those tools are able to find, read and trust your site. This is the checklist I use on client sites, and on my own, with a note on which parts are documented by the platforms and which are good practice without hard proof.

1. Let AI Search Crawlers In

AI assistants can only recommend what they can read. Open your robots.txt file (yoursite.com/robots.txt) and check that it does not block the crawlers that AI search tools use:

• OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says sites that block it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as plain navigational links.
• PerplexityBot for Perplexity’s search results, according to Perplexity’s crawler documentation.
• Googlebot for Google Search. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode use pages from the normal Google Search index, so blocking Googlebot removes you from those too.
• Bingbot for Bing. Microsoft’s Copilot uses Bing search results when it answers questions from the web.

Training crawlers are a separate decision. GPTBot collects content that may be used to train OpenAI’s models, and OpenAI states that each setting is independent: you can block GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot. Google works the same way with Google-Extended, a robots.txt token that controls Gemini training and grounding. Google states that it does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search.

In practice, a small business that wants ChatGPT search visibility but not training use would have a User-agent: OAI-SearchBot group with Allow: / and a User-agent: GPTBot group with Disallow: /. If your file only says User-agent: * and Allow: /, every crawler is already allowed.

Two limits are worth knowing. Allowing a crawler makes you eligible. It does not make you recommended. And OpenAI notes that robots.txt changes can take around 24 hours to take effect on its side.

Also check your firewall or hosting security settings. Some bot-protection features block crawlers before they ever reach robots.txt, so a clean robots.txt file is not proof that crawlers can get in.

2. Answer the Question in the First Two Sentences

AI search tools often quote or summarise short passages rather than whole pages. If your service page opens with “Welcome to our website, we are passionate about excellence,” there is nothing useful to quote.

Rewrite the opening of every service page so it works as a complete answer on its own:

We build fast, custom-code websites for small businesses in Leeds, with a CMS your team can edit. A 5 to 8 page site takes 1 to 2 weeks.

What you do, for whom, where, and how long it takes. Then give the detail underneath.

No platform documents this as a ranking factor. It is a writing practice: a clear opening is easier for a person to scan and easier for any system to quote accurately.

3. One Page per Service

If all your services sit on one page, a search engine or AI tool has to work out which part answers which question. Give each main service its own page, with its own title, its own opening answer and its own questions and answers.

This is standard SEO practice, and it also gives an AI tool one clear page to link to when someone asks about that specific service.

4. Add Structured Data, and Know Its Limits

Structured data (schema markup) is code that describes what a page is about, so machines do not have to infer it from the text. For a small business, the useful types are usually:

• Organization or LocalBusiness: your name, logo, contact details, location and social profiles
• Service: what each service is and who provides it
• BreadcrumbList: where each page sits on the site
• Article or BlogPosting: the author and dates of articles

Three limits matter here:

• Valid is not the same as eligible. Google’s structured data policies say correct markup does not guarantee a rich result, and that markup must describe content visible on the page.
• AI Overviews do not need special markup. Google’s guidance on AI features in Search says there is no special schema, AI text file or other markup required to appear. A page needs to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet.
• FAQ rich results are gone. Google limited them to well-known government and health sites in 2023, then stopped showing FAQ rich results in Google Search from May 7, 2026. FAQPage remains a valid schema.org type, but adding it will not produce expanded FAQ results in Google.

So add structured data because it describes your business accurately, not as a trick for AI answers. Test it with Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator, and remember that they tell you whether the markup is valid, not whether Google will show anything.

5. Make Your Listings Match Your Site

AI answers do not only come from your website. For local questions especially, search engines and AI tools can also draw on business listings and directories. Make sure these exist and say the same thing as your site:

• Google Business Profile
• Bing Places for Business
• Industry directories and review sites relevant to your field
• Your LinkedIn company page and other social profiles

Same business name, same address or service area, same phone number, same description of what you do. Consistent details have long been standard local SEO advice, and they make it easier for any system to be sure who you are.

6. Be Specific and First-Hand

A page that says the same thing as a thousand others gives an AI tool, or a reader, no reason to pick it.

Google’s guidance on helpful, people-first content asks whether content shows first-hand expertise, such as having actually used a product or done the work. That guidance is written for Google Search, and there is no published proof that AI assistants weigh it the same way. But it is the kind of detail only you can give: real project examples, real timelines, real prices or price ranges, honest trade-offs, and lessons from your own work. “We built an 8-page site in 3 days, and here is what we skipped” is far more useful than “we deliver fast.”

Make it clear who wrote the page, too. A named author with a real profile is part of what Google’s guidance calls the “who” of content.

7. Keep It Accurate and Dated

Put a visible publish date on articles, add an updated date when you make a real change, and use the same dates in your structured data. Remove or refresh pages that describe services or prices you no longer offer.

Be careful with one thing. Google’s helpful content guidance lists changing a page’s date to make it seem fresh, when the content has not substantially changed, as a warning sign. Update the date because the page changed, not to look current. Whether freshness itself helps you appear in AI answers is not documented by OpenAI or Google. What is clear is that outdated prices and services are a bad experience for anyone who finds them, human or AI.

8. Add an llms.txt File (Optional)

llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of your site that summarises your business and links to your key pages, written for AI tools. It is a community proposal, not an official standard. Google’s AI features guidance says you do not need AI text files to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and neither OpenAI nor Google documents using it for recommendations.

So treat it as a cheap extra, not a ranking factor. If your site is generated from code, it can be built automatically from your real pages so it never drifts out of date. If it means maintaining one more file by hand, the time is better spent on your service pages.

How to Check Your Own Site in 15 Minutes

You do not need paid tools for a first pass:

1. robots.txt. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. Look for Disallow: / under User-agent: *, OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot or Bingbot.
2. Noindex tags. On your key pages, view the source and search for noindex. One forgotten tag from a staging site can hide a page from Google entirely.
3. Indexing. In Google Search Console, run the URL Inspection tool on your home page and each service page. It tells you whether Google has indexed the page and whether it can crawl it. Bing Webmaster Tools offers the same for Bing.
4. Snippet controls. Google’s AI features use the same controls as normal snippets. A nosnippet or very low max-snippet setting limits what can be shown about your page.
5. Openings. Read the first two sentences of each service page aloud. Would they answer “who does X near me and how long does it take?” on their own?
6. Structured data. Paste a service page into the Rich Results Test or Schema Markup Validator and fix any errors.
7. Listings. Search your business name and compare your Google Business Profile, Bing Places and main directory listings against your site.

How to Tell Whether It Is Working

Asking ChatGPT “who is the best web developer in Leeds?” once is not a test. AI answers vary between users, sessions and wording, so a single result proves very little either way.

Better signals:

• Google Search Console. Google reports traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode inside the normal Performance report, under the Web search type. It is not split out separately, so watch overall impressions and clicks for your key pages.
• ChatGPT referrals. OpenAI’s publisher FAQ says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to links it sends, so you can see those visits in Google Analytics or any analytics tool that records UTM parameters.
• Enquiries. Add “How did you find us?” to your contact form. It is low-tech, and often the most honest data a small business has.
• A repeatable prompt check. If you want to track AI answers directly, write down five to ten questions a real customer would ask, run them monthly, and record which sources appear. Treat it as a rough trend, not a score.

Give changes a few weeks. Crawling, indexing and answer generation all take time, and you will not see the effect of a robots.txt fix or a rewritten page the same day.

How I Apply This on My Own Site

This site follows the same checklist. Each service has its own page with an answer-first opening and its own visible questions and answers, like the page for business websites. Service pages carry Service and BreadcrumbList structured data, and articles carry BlogPosting data with their publish and updated dates. My robots.txt allows all crawlers, including GPTBot, which is a choice I made for a portfolio site and not one every business needs to copy. There is also an llms.txt file, generated from the site’s own content.

I have not measured whether any of this has changed how often AI tools mention me, so I am not going to claim that it has. It is the setup I believe gives a site the best chance, built on what the platforms document.

None of this is a trick. It is the same thing good SEO has always asked for: let search engines in, be clear about what you do, be consistent everywhere, and say something useful. AI search just makes it matter more.