How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Google AI

A café owner in Pleven asked me last month: "When someone types where can I get good coffee near the centre into ChatGPT, why does it name the place across the street and not us?" It's a fair question, and in 2026 it's a buying question too — because the answer is rarely "buy an AI tool". It's usually "fix the basics that AI assistants copy from": your website, your Google Business Profile and your reviews. Here is what the current evidence actually says, what is hype, and what you can check today.

How AI assistants pick a local business

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode don't have a secret directory of shops. When someone asks for a recommendation, they search the web, read a handful of sources and summarise them. For local businesses those sources are mostly the same places a human would look: Google Maps, niche directories, review sites, Facebook — and the business's own website.

Two large studies this year point in the same direction. Insites analysed 10,000 local businesses across ChatGPT and Perplexity (published May 2026), and SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index audited around 350,000 locations of multi-location brands across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Both are correlational — they show what visible businesses have in common, not proof of cause — but the patterns are useful.

Read that middle number again. AI already "knows" almost everyone, but nearly half the time it gets something wrong — opening hours, services, the address, whether you still exist. That's not a ranking problem, it's a source problem: the assistant is repeating whatever outdated or thin information it found.

What the data says matters (and what doesn't)

What Google itself says about AI Overviews and AI Mode

Google's own documentation for site owners is refreshingly plain: there are no extra requirements or special optimisations to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. No AI-specific text file, no special schema. A page needs to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in normal Search — that's it. Their recommended practices are the classic ones:

• Let Google crawl the site (robots.txt and your hosting/CDN don't block it).
• Link your pages to each other so content is easy to find.
• Keep important information as real text, not only inside images or PDFs.
• Make sure any structured data matches what's visible on the page.
• Keep your Business Profile (and Merchant Center, if you sell online) up to date.
• Verify the site in Search Console — AI Overviews and AI Mode clicks appear in its Performance report.

The quiet mistake: blocking the bots that would mention you

Here's one I see on real audits. A security plugin or a well-meaning developer adds a robots.txt rule that blocks "all AI bots". The problem: not all of them do the same job. OpenAI, for example, runs GPTBot (content that may be used to train models) and OAI-SearchBot (used to surface sites in ChatGPT's search features). OpenAI's documentation states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, apart from navigational links. The two are controlled separately, so you can decline training and still be findable.

Your 30-minute AI visibility check

You don't need a paid tool to get a first picture. Do this today:

1. Ask the assistants. In ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, ask "What is [your business name] in [town]?" and "Recommend a [your service] in [town]". Note what's wrong or missing.
2. Google yourself in Maps. Are your hours, phone, category and photos current? Is the website link there and working?
3. Count your reviews and when the last one arrived. Reply to the latest few — response rate is one of the signals mentioned above.
4. Open your website on your phone. Can a stranger see in ten seconds what you do, where, for whom and how to contact you — in text, not inside a picture?
5. Check you have a page per main service (not one page listing twelve things). Each page should answer the questions customers really ask: price range, how long it takes, where you work.
6. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for "Disallow: /" under Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot or "*". If you don't understand what's there, ask whoever built the site.
7. Make your details match everywhere: website footer, Business Profile, Facebook, directories.

AI doesn't invent your reputation. It repeats it — so make sure there's something accurate to repeat.— the short version of this article

When the fix is a better website

Most of the checklist is free: reviews, a tidy Business Profile, consistent details. But the evidence keeps pointing at one thing you can't fake — a site with clear, specific pages that an assistant (and a customer) can read. If your site is a single page, an outdated template, or a menu saved as an image, that's usually where the gap is.

A good small business site for this purpose isn't exotic. It's a fast, accessible site with a page for each service, real text about prices and process, your location and hours in plain HTML, working contact options and nothing blocking the crawlers. That's exactly the kind of site I build: websites from €890, live in 2–5 weeks, with 3 months of free care after launch.

Where to start

If you want a quick outside view first, run the free website check — it looks at the basics that both Google and AI assistants rely on, and you'll see what's worth fixing before you spend anything. If the result says the site itself is the bottleneck, have a look at how I approach web design and send me a short note about your business. Either way, ask ChatGPT about yourself tonight — it's the most honest five-minute audit you'll do this year.