How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and Google's AI answers

More customers now ask an AI assistant instead of scrolling search results. Here is what actually decides whether your business is the one it names, and what to fix first.

A customer used to type "plumber near me" into Google and scroll ten blue links. More and more of them now ask a question instead: "who is a good plumber in my area that can come today?" They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, or Google itself, which now answers many searches with an AI Overview before any links. The assistant names two or three businesses, and that is often where the decision gets made.

So the question every small business is asking this year is a fair one: how do you become one of the names? There is a whole industry forming around that question, with new acronyms (GEO, AEO, LLMO) and a lot of confident promises. This guide sticks to what the platforms themselves have said and what you can check, and it is shorter than you might expect.

How an AI assistant decides who to mention

When an assistant answers a question about businesses, it usually searches the web first, reads a handful of pages, and writes its answer from what it found. That is why it can name a café that opened last month. It also means the assistant can only recommend you if three things are true:

1. 1It is allowed to read your website. If your site blocks its crawler, you are invisible to it, however good the site is.
2. 2It can find you when it searches. The assistants lean on search indexes, so the basics of being findable in ordinary search still decide whether you are in the pile it reads.
3. 3What it reads makes you an obvious answer. Clear facts on your own site, backed up by what other sites, reviews and listings say about you.

AI search does not replace SEO. It rewards the businesses that already did the basics, and it punishes vagueness harder than Google ever did.

What Google and OpenAI actually say

Google is unusually direct about its AI features. Its guidance for site owners says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, no special schema to add and no new AI text files to create. A page that is indexed and eligible to show a snippet in normal search is eligible to appear. In other words: the way into Google's AI answers is the way into Google.

OpenAI's crawler documentation is just as clear about ChatGPT search. Its search crawler is called OAI-SearchBot, and sites that block it are not shown in ChatGPT search answers. OpenAI recommends allowing it in your robots.txt. That crawler is separate from GPTBot, which collects training data, so you can say yes to appearing in answers and no to training if you prefer.

The checklist, in the order that matters

1. Make your site readable by machines, not just people

Assistants read text. If your opening hours are in an image, your prices are in a PDF and your services only appear inside a slider that loads with JavaScript, a crawler may see a page that says almost nothing. Put the important facts in plain text on the page: what you do, where you do it, who it is for, what it costs (if you are happy to say), and how to get in touch.

Speed and reliability count too. A crawler that times out or hits an error moves on to the next source. That is a hosting question as much as a content one, and our guide to Core Web Vitals for small sites covers the parts worth fixing.

2. Answer the questions people actually ask

People ask assistants complete questions: "do you do emergency call-outs on Sundays?", "how much does a deep clean of a three-bedroom house cost?" A page that answers those questions in its own words, near the top, is far easier to quote than a page of slogans. A short FAQ on each service page is one of the cheapest wins available. If you already run a chat assistant, its conversation log is a list of these questions written by your customers.

3. Be the same business everywhere

Assistants cross-check. If your website, Google Business Profile, Facebook page and directory listings disagree on your name, phone number, address or hours, you look less certain, and an assistant that is unsure tends to recommend someone else. Pick one exact version of each fact and make every listing match. Our local SEO guide walks through the listings that matter most.

4. Earn mentions on other people's sites

When an assistant recommends a business, it is often summarising what other sources say: reviews, local news, "best of" lists, industry directories, a supplier's case studies. You cannot write those yourself, but you can make them likelier. Ask happy customers for reviews, join the associations in your trade, and say yes when a local publication asks for a quote.

5. Use structured data, but for the right reason

Structured data (schema.org markup such as LocalBusiness, Product and FAQPage) will not by itself get you into an AI answer, and Google says so. What it does is state your facts in a format machines cannot misread, and it powers the rich results in ordinary search that still drive clicks. It is worth having; it is not a shortcut.

6. Consider an llms.txt file, without expecting miracles

llms.txt is a proposed convention: a plain-text file at the root of your site that summarises what you do and links to your most important pages. Google has said it does not need one. Some AI tools do read it, it takes an hour to write, and it forces you to describe your business in a few honest paragraphs, which is a useful exercise anyway. We publish our own for exactly that reason.

How to tell if it is working

• Ask the assistants yourself. Each month, ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the three questions your best customers would ask. Note who gets named, and which pages they cite.
• Check Google Search Console. Google counts AI Overview and AI Mode traffic inside the normal Performance report, under the Web search type.
• Look for AI referrals in analytics. Visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and similar domains show up as referral traffic in Google Analytics 4. Our GA4 guide shows where to look.
• Ask new customers how they found you. "ChatGPT told me" is an answer more owners are hearing, and it rarely shows up in any dashboard.

What to be wary of

Nobody can guarantee you a place in an AI answer, because nobody outside the AI companies controls what the assistant writes. Be careful with anyone selling a secret prompt, a special file or a network of AI-generated pages that will "train" ChatGPT to recommend you. Mass-produced pages written to game the system are exactly what search engines spend their time demoting, and the assistants rely on those same engines.

Where Serverlys can help

Most of this checklist you can do yourself in a few afternoons. If you would rather hand it to someone, this is the work our teams do every day:

And once AI search starts sending people to your site, make sure someone answers them. ConvoAI puts an AI agent on your website that answers visitors from your own information, day and night, and hands the real conversations to you. It has a free plan, and we wrote about how it works here.