How to get your local business recommended by ChatGPT

More customers now skip the list of blue links and simply ask an assistant: "Who's a good emergency plumber in Hoboken?" or "Which dentist near me is good with nervous patients?" ChatGPT answers with a short list of names. If you're not on it, that customer never sees you. This guide explains how those answers get put together and what you can realistically do to be one of the names.

How ChatGPT decides which businesses to name

ChatGPT doesn't keep a secret directory of approved businesses. When someone asks a local question, it usually does one or both of these things:

• Draws on what it learned in training. The model has read a huge amount of public web text. Businesses that are mentioned often and consistently across that text are more likely to be "known" to it.
• Searches the web in real time. For local questions, ChatGPT often runs a live search, reads a handful of pages (your site, directories, review sites, local news, "best of" lists), and summarizes what it finds.

Either way, the assistant is trying to answer one question: which businesses can I confidently say are good at this, in this place? Confidence comes from clear, consistent and corroborated information. Your job is to make that information easy to find and hard to misread.

Step 1: Make your website state the obvious, plainly

People often assume an AI "figures out" what a business does. It's better not to rely on that. Many small business sites bury the basics inside images, sliders or vague slogans like "Quality you can trust." An assistant reading the page needs plain text that says:

• What you do, in the words customers use ("emergency plumbing, water heater repair, drain cleaning").
• Where you do it (your city, the neighborhoods or towns you serve).
• Who you are (business name, address if you have a storefront, phone number).
• Why someone would pick you (specialties, years in business, licenses, languages spoken, hours, whether you take same-day jobs).

A good test: read only the text of your homepage out loud. If a stranger couldn't tell what you do and where within ten seconds, an assistant may struggle too.

Step 2: Give each core service its own page

If you offer five services and they're all one bullet list on one page, you're giving search tools very little to match against. A page called "Water heater repair in Jersey City" with a few useful paragraphs (what you fix, typical turnaround, brands you work on, what affects the price) is far easier to surface for that exact question than a generic services page.

You don't need dozens of pages. Start with the three to five services that bring in most of your revenue.

Step 3: Get your business details consistent everywhere

Assistants cross-check. If your website says one phone number, Google says another, and Yelp still lists your old address, that inconsistency lowers confidence. Make sure your name, address and phone number (often called NAP) match exactly across:

• Your website (footer and contact page)
• Google Business Profile
• Apple Business Connect (Apple Maps)
• Bing Places
• Yelp, Facebook and any industry directories that matter in your field

"Exactly" matters more than people expect. "Suite 4" vs "#4" is minor, but a different business name or an old phone number is the kind of thing that causes confusion.

Step 4: Earn reviews that say something specific

Reviews are one of the most common sources assistants quote or summarize. A review that says "Great service!" helps a little. A review that says "They fixed our leaking water heater the same afternoon and explained the options without upselling" tells an assistant what you're good at and for whom.

You can't write reviews for customers, and you shouldn't offer incentives for them (that breaks most platforms' rules). You can make it easy: send a direct review link after a job and ask customers to mention what you did for them. Reply to reviews too, including the bad ones, calmly and specifically.

Step 5: Show up in the places assistants read

When an assistant searches, it often lands on third-party pages: local "best of" roundups, industry directories, chamber of commerce listings, local news, Reddit threads and neighborhood forums. You can't control all of these, but you can:

• Claim and complete your profiles on the directories that matter in your industry.
• Ask your local chamber, BID or trade association for a listing.
• Sponsor or take part in real local events that get written up.
• Answer questions honestly in local community forums when it's genuinely relevant (no spam).

The goal isn't backlinks for their own sake. It's to make sure that when an assistant reads around the web about your town and your trade, your name keeps coming up in a credible context.

Step 6: Add structured data and an FAQ

Structured data (schema.org markup, usually JSON-LD) is a small block of code that labels your business details in a machine-readable way: business type, address, hours, phone, service area. It doesn't guarantee anything, but it removes guesswork for tools that read your page.

A short FAQ page answering the real questions customers ask ("Do you do weekend appointments?", "Do you take insurance?", "How fast can you come out?") gives assistants ready-made, quotable answers in your own words.

Step 7: Don't block the crawlers you want to be found by

Some website setups block AI crawlers by default in a file called robots.txt. If OpenAI's search crawler (OAI-SearchBot) or other assistants' crawlers can't read your site, they have to rely on what others say about you. Check your robots.txt, or ask whoever manages your site to confirm it allows the assistants you care about.

What not to do

• Don't stuff keywords. Repeating "best plumber Jersey City" twenty times makes the page worse for humans and doesn't help assistants understand you.
• Don't fake reviews or buy listings on spammy sites. Platforms remove fake reviews, and low-quality link farms don't add credibility.
• Don't trust anyone promising a guaranteed spot. AI answers vary by assistant, by how the question is phrased, and over time. Nobody controls them.

How to know if it's working

The simplest way is to ask. Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and ask the questions your customers would ask: "best [your service] in [your town]", "[your service] near [neighborhood] open on Saturday". Note who gets named and which sources are cited. Repeat every few weeks, because answers change.

That's exactly what our free Viz Score check automates: it asks several AI assistants the kinds of questions your customers ask, shows whether you're named, who's named instead, and which sites they're relying on. If you'd like a starting point, run a free check and work through the fixes above in order of what it finds.