How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT and other AI assistants?
AI assistants recommend businesses whose websites they can read, whose pages answer the buyer's question in the first two sentences, and who publish specifics a competitor cannot copy. Being consistent about your name, town and phone everywhere, and being mentioned by others, helps the assistant trust that you are real.
Start by measuring
You cannot fix what you have not checked. Ask the questions your buyers ask, in the assistants they use, and record who gets cited. Our free tool BusinessPulse does this with 20 real buyer questions for your service and area and emails you the results. Most owners are surprised to see directories and competitors cited instead of them.
What moves citation, in order of evidence
1. Let the assistants read your site
ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude send their own crawlers when someone asks a question. If your robots.txt blocks them, or the answer is hidden behind scripts or inside a PDF, you cannot be cited no matter how good the writing is. Check that bots like OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot are allowed.
2. Answer the question in the first two sentences
A page that opens with the answer is quotable. One that opens with "Welcome to our family-owned business" is not. Write one page per real buyer question, and put the answer at the top.
3. Publish what only you know
Price ranges and what moves them, how long the job takes, which towns need which permit, what goes wrong. Generic pages lose to whoever published a number.
4. Keep your name, town and phone identical everywhere
Your website, Google Business Profile, Yelp, LinkedIn and industry directories should all match, so the assistant can tie them to one business.
5. Get mentioned by others
Associations, licensing bodies, suppliers, local press and clients' sites. Assistants lean on what others say about you.
6. Add structured data
Schema.org markup for your business, services and FAQs is cheap and standard. Treat it as a hedge, not a lever with a proven effect.
What does not work
- Ranking factor lists. Assistants do not publish one, and answers vary from run to run.
- Paying for llms.txt. There is little evidence any major assistant uses it. Publishing one is harmless; billing for it is not honest.
- Guaranteed placement. Nobody can promise an assistant will name you. Anyone who does is guessing.
How we do it
Our Saxon AEO service starts with a full audit of more than 100 buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, then writes the pages and fixes, and re-measures every month against your baseline. Prices are published in the BusinessPulse cost guide.