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

Ask ChatGPT to recommend a plumber, a dentist or an accountant near you and it does not hand back ten blue links. It names two or three businesses and tells you why. Here's how those names get picked, and what a business owner can do to become one of them.

What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of making your business easy for AI assistants to find, understand and recommend. That means ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Copilot. Where SEO aims to get your page into a list of search results, AEO aims to get your business named inside the answer itself.

You will see the same idea called GEO (generative engine optimization), LLM SEO or AI search optimization. The labels are still settling. The work underneath them is the same.

Why does AEO matter for a small business?

Because the shape of the answer changed. A search results page gave you ten chances: if you came sixth, someone might still scroll down to you. An AI answer usually names a handful of businesses and stops. There is no page two.

And the people asking are often close to buying. "Who is the best emergency electrician in Leeds?" is not research, it is a shortlist. If you are not on it, you never find out the job existed, much like the calls that go to voicemail and never ring back.

How does ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?

For questions about specific businesses, the assistants mostly do not answer from memory. They run a web search, read a handful of pages, and write an answer from what they found. So the real question is which pages they find, and which ones they trust.

• Where they search. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google's own index. ChatGPT's search leans on third-party indexes, Bing's among them, plus OpenAI's own crawler. Perplexity runs its own crawler too. If you are invisible in Google and Bing, you are mostly invisible to all of them.
• What they can read. A page the crawler cannot fetch, or one whose text only appears after JavaScript runs, may as well not exist. More on this below, because it is the most common silent problem.
• What answers the question. They favor passages that answer directly: a clear sentence with the facts in it, not a paragraph about how much you value excellence.
• What other sites agree on. For local and service questions, reviews, directory listings, local news and "best of" roundups carry real weight. If your website says one thing and nothing else on the internet mentions you, the AI has one source and a reason to be cautious.

Can AI crawlers actually read your website?

Check this first, because no amount of good writing helps if the door is locked. There are three common ways it gets locked without anyone noticing.

1. Your robots.txt file turns them away. Every AI company runs named crawlers, and some sites block them, often because a plugin or theme did it by default. The ones that matter for being recommended are the search crawlers: OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, Claude-SearchBot for Claude, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, and the ordinary Googlebot and Bingbot. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for any of those names next to the word Disallow.
2. Your firewall or CDN blocks them before robots.txt is even read. Cloudflare sits in front of a large share of small business websites, and it has changed its default AI crawler settings more than once since 2025, with different defaults for different kinds of bot. If your site runs through Cloudflare, open its AI crawler settings and make sure search crawlers are allowed.
3. Your text only appears after JavaScript runs. Google renders JavaScript. Most AI crawlers do not: they read the raw HTML and move on. Some site builders send an almost empty page and fill it in with code afterwards. To check, open your site, right-click, choose "View page source", and search for a sentence from your homepage. If it is not in the source, AI crawlers probably cannot see it either.

One trap worth knowing about: blocking Google-Extended does not take you out of Google's AI Overviews. That setting controls whether Google uses your content to train and ground its Gemini models. AI Overviews read your site through ordinary Googlebot, like the rest of Google Search.

How should you write pages so AI quotes them?

Write so that any single section could be lifted out and still make sense on its own. That is what actually happens: the assistant takes a passage, sometimes one sentence, and builds its answer around it.

• Answer first. Put the direct answer in the first sentence or two under each heading, then explain. If the heading is "How much does a boiler service cost?", the next line should contain a price or a range.
• Use the questions as headings. Customers ask questions, and AI answers questions. A heading phrased the way people actually ask makes the match obvious.
• State the facts a machine would need. Which towns you cover, your hours, what you charge or how you charge, how fast you respond, and what you do not do. Vague copy gives the AI nothing to quote.
• One topic per page. A page about everything is a strong match for nothing. A page about emergency plumbing in one city is easy to match to a question about emergency plumbing in that city.
• Keep it current. Show the date a page was last updated, and actually update it. Some assistants, Perplexity in particular, lean toward fresh pages.

What has to happen off your website?

This is the slow part, and for local businesses it often matters most. An AI deciding whether to recommend you looks for other sources that agree you exist, that you are good, and that you do what you say you do.

• Claim and complete your listings. Google Business Profile, Bing Places and Apple Business Connect at a minimum, then the directories that matter in your trade. Fill in every field: categories, services, service area, hours and photos.
• Keep the details identical everywhere. Same business name, same phone number, same address, same one-line description. Conflicting listings are how assistants end up mixing you up with another business, or quoting last year's hours.
• Get reviews, steadily. Reviews are evidence and vocabulary at once. A review saying "they fixed our boiler on a Sunday" tells the AI you do Sunday boiler repairs. The reliable way to get them is to ask every happy customer automatically.
• Get mentioned where your customers already look. Local news, trade associations, a supplier's "find an installer" page, local "best of" lists, and genuine answers on Reddit and forums. Real mentions, not bought links.

Do llms.txt files and schema markup help?

Schema markup does, modestly. It states your business name, services, service area, hours, FAQs and reviews in a format machines read directly, and Google uses it. It will not rescue thin content, but it removes the guesswork.

llms.txt probably does not, yet. It is a proposed file that gives AI systems a plain summary of your site. Google has said its search ignores it, and no major AI search engine has said it uses the file to decide who to recommend. I keep one on this site because it takes ten minutes, but it is not where your effort should go.

How do you know if AEO is working?

1. Ask the questions yourself, on a schedule. Write down ten questions a customer might ask before hiring someone like you. Once a month, put them to ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Perplexity and Claude, and note who gets named. Use the same wording every time, in a private window, so your own history does not skew the answer. Answers vary from run to run, so watch the trend across all ten, not any single answer.
2. Watch your analytics for AI referrals. Visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com show up as referral traffic in Google Analytics. ChatGPT also tags many of the links it sends with utm_source=chatgpt.com, which makes them easy to filter.
3. Ask new customers how they found you. Add "ChatGPT or another AI assistant" as an option on your enquiry form. A lot of AI-driven discovery never shows up as a click: the customer reads your name in the answer, then searches for you directly.

Can you do AEO yourself?

Most of it, yes. Give it an afternoon: check your robots.txt, view your page source, claim your Google, Bing and Apple listings, rewrite your homepage and main service page so each section answers first, and set up review requests. That covers a large share of the work, and none of it needs a developer.

It gets harder on a site you did not build, with structured data that has to stay in sync with the page, and with keeping at it for long enough to see results. That is the point where it can make sense to hand AEO to someone. The agency vs DIY guide applies here too, and the questions to ask an agency work just as well on anyone selling AEO. Start with whether they guarantee results. They should not.

Frequently asked questions

Is AEO replacing SEO?

No. AI assistants search the web before they answer, so ranking in Google and Bing is still the foundation. AEO adds a layer on top: making sure that once you are found, your pages are easy to quote and other sites back up what you say. Doing AEO well usually improves your SEO too.

How long does it take to show up in ChatGPT?

Technical fixes like unblocking a crawler can count within days, once the crawlers come back. Content changes and new listings usually take weeks to be picked up, and reviews and mentions build over months. There is no fixed timeline, because nobody controls when an assistant re-reads your site.

Should I block AI crawlers to protect my content?

Not if you want AI assistants to recommend your business, at least not the search crawlers. You can block training crawlers like GPTBot and still allow search crawlers like OAI-SearchBot. That is a reasonable middle ground if you are uneasy about your content being used to train models.

Can anyone guarantee my business will be recommended by AI?

No. AI answers change between questions, between runs and between people asking. Anyone guaranteeing you a spot is guessing. What you can control is whether the AI can read your site, whether your pages answer the questions clearly, and whether other sources back up what you say.