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How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business

By · - Where ChatGPT actually gets the businesses it names, why Yelp matters more since July, what a handful of third-party reviews does, and the steps in the order we'd take them.

Four blank cream cards laid in a row on a linen tablecloth, with a fifth card set apart on a round brass tray, beside a sprig of eucalyptus

The short answer

ChatGPT recommends a business when other sites it trusts describe that business well. On a local question it searches the web live, reads a handful of sources, and those sources are mostly review platforms and "best of" lists, not your homepage. So the work is getting reviewed in the places it reads, getting onto the lists it quotes, and making sure every description of you says the same thing.

You can't pay for a mention. OpenAI started showing ads in ChatGPT in February 2026 and said in the same announcement that "ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you." Anyone selling guaranteed placement is selling something OpenAI says doesn't exist.

Why this is worth an afternoon

At OpenAI's developer conference on September 29, 2026, the slide behind Sam Altman read 1.2 billion weekly users. In BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey, 45 percent of consumers had used ChatGPT or another AI tool to find a local business, up from 6 percent the year before. Only Google and Facebook were used more.

Those are the people asking "who's a good physio near Kitsilano" in a chat window instead of a search bar. They get three or four names back, not ten blue links. Being one of the names is the whole game.

Where ChatGPT gets the businesses it names

For most of 2025, marketing blogs repeated that Foursquare supplied most of ChatGPT's local results. That figure came from a 50-prompt test in five Spanish cities. In August 2026, Ben Fisher at Steady Demand ran 2,880 prompts across 12 industries and 12 US metros and checked which source backed each business card ChatGPT showed.

Share of ChatGPT business cards it grounded
Yelp95.83%
TripAdvisor28.90%
OpenTable16.88%
Resy8.96%
Google4.62%
Apple Maps0.97%
Foursquare0.00%

A card can draw on more than one source, which is why the column adds up past 100. The headline is plain enough: Yelp sits under almost every local business ChatGPT shows. That isn't an accident. On July 23, 2026, Axios reported that Yelp is licensing its reviews, photos and business details to OpenAI for ChatGPT's local answers, with a "Request a Quote" feature for service businesses on the way. Yelp's CEO put it bluntly: "If you want to answer local queries, you really need Yelp."

Your Google Business Profile still matters, a lot. It's what Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode lean on, and it's where most of your customers check you. It just isn't the main thing ChatGPT reads.

Outside "near me" questions, the source mix changes. When Ahrefs looked at ChatGPT's answers to 750 recommendation prompts for software, products and agencies, 43.8 percent of the pages it cited were "best X" lists. More than a third of those lists sat on low-authority sites, and brands placed near the top of a list showed up in ChatGPT's answers more often.

Step 1: Claim your Yelp page, even if you never think about Yelp

Plenty of clinics and studios in Canada treat Yelp as an American restaurant app and leave the free listing unclaimed. Given the table above, that's the first thing to fix. Claim it, then fill in what ChatGPT can lift straight into a card: category, services, hours, service area, photos, and a description that matches your website word for word.

One rule catches owners out. Yelp asks businesses not to request Yelp reviews, and its software moves reviews it judges solicited into a "not recommended" section that doesn't count toward your rating. So don't send a "review us on Yelp" text. Ask for Google reviews, which Google allows, and let the Yelp page earn reviews on its own. A complete, accurate listing still counts for a lot even with a modest review count.

Step 2: Get a few reviews on the platform for your category

The most encouraging study we've read this year is about how little it takes to stop being invisible. Seer Interactive analysed 804,491 AI responses covering 1,926 brands and compared brands by their Trustpilot presence. Brands with no profile had a median citation rate of 1 percent. Brands with just 1 to 13 reviews had 53.5 percent. ChatGPT leaned on Trustpilot more than any other assistant, at 57.9 percent.

Notice the threshold. Not hundreds of reviews. A profile with a handful of real ones. The same study found review sites made up 1.51 percent of citations when people were just learning about a category and 24.27 percent once they were close to choosing, which is exactly the moment you want to be named.

Which platform depends on what you sell. For a clinic, salon or studio it's Google and Yelp. For a B2B service or an agency it's usually Clutch, which offers a free profile and verifies each review. For e-commerce, Trustpilot. Ask ChatGPT a question your customer would ask, open the sources it cites, and you'll see which platform runs your category. Our review system covers the asking without breaking anyone's rules.

Buying reviews is a different matter and a short conversation. The FTC's rule on fake reviews, announced in August 2024, bans fake and AI-generated reviews and paying for reviews of a particular sentiment, with civil penalties for knowing violators.

Step 3: Get onto the lists ChatGPT quotes

If 43.8 percent of the pages behind recommendations are "best X" lists, the lists for your city and category are worth finding. Ask ChatGPT "best [your service] in [your city]" five or six times and write down every list it cites. Then look at who publishes them: local magazines, neighbourhood blogs, industry associations, "three best rated" style directories, the chamber of commerce.

Some will add you if you ask and fit the criteria. Some want a fee, and you should weigh that like any ad. A few are junk, and Google's own AI search guide warns that "seeking inauthentic 'mentions'" isn't as helpful as it might seem. The useful test is simple: would a real customer read this list and trust it? If not, skip it.

Step 4: Be talked about, not just linked to

Ahrefs measured which signals line up with how often 75,000 brands get mentioned in ChatGPT. YouTube mentions correlated at 0.737 and mentions of the brand across the web at 0.664. Domain Rating, the backlink score SEO people obsess over, came in at 0.266. Ahrefs' own summary: ChatGPT "shows the weakest correlations of all three AI assistants for almost every traditional brand authority signal."

That's good news if you're small. You don't need a decade of backlinks. You need people saying your name in public: a local news mention, a podcast, a video someone made about their visit, a supplier who features you as a customer. Correlation isn't cause, and nobody can promise one video moves the answer. But it tells you where ChatGPT's attention goes, and it isn't link counts.

Step 5: Make every description of you say the same thing

ChatGPT has to work out which business you are before it can recommend you. When your profiles disagree, it can pick the wrong one or blend you with a stranger.

It happened to us. In July 2026, asked about Sundayable by name, Perplexity answered from our LinkedIn page rather than our website, described a product we'd retired two months earlier, and mixed us up with unrelated companies that share the word "Sunday." We rewrote the LinkedIn page that day and declared the site and the profile as one company in our structured data.

That second fix is a property called sameAs. Schema.org defines it as the "URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity." Google says Organization markup helps it "disambiguate your organization in search results," and lists your social and review profiles as the pages to point to. Your web person can add it in under an hour.

The rest is a checklist you can do yourself:

  • Same business name everywhere, the one on your sign. Google's own rule is that it should match "your storefront, website, stationery"
  • Same address and phone number on the site, Google Business Profile, Yelp, LinkedIn and every directory
  • The same one-sentence description of what you do and where, copied rather than rewritten
  • Old profiles from a previous name or product either updated or closed

Step 6: Give it pages it can quote

Once ChatGPT has your name, it often opens your site to check details. Two things decide whether it can. First, your robots.txt has to let OAI-SearchBot in; OpenAI says sites that block it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers." Second, your prices and services have to be in the page itself, not loaded by a script. Our AI SEO guide covers both.

Then make the pages easy to cite. In a study of 1.4 million ChatGPT prompts, Ahrefs found ChatGPT cited only about half of the pages it pulled up. Cited pages had titles that matched the question more closely, and pages with readable addresses like /services/sports-physio were cited 89.78 percent of the time against 81.11 percent for pages with a string of numbers. One page per service, titled the way a customer would ask for it, with the price and the area in the first lines.

Step 7: Measure how often, not where

Ask ChatGPT the same question twice and you'll often get a different list. SparkToro and Gumshoe had 600 volunteers run 12 prompts 2,961 times through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI. The chance of getting the same list of brands twice was under 1 in 100, and the same order about 1 in 1,000. What was stable was how often a brand appeared at all.

So measure that. Write five questions a customer would actually type. Run each three times a month, logged out, and record whether you're named and who is. After three months you have a share-of-answers number you can watch move. A single screenshot of ChatGPT naming you, or not naming you, tells you almost nothing.

What it costs, and when you don't need us

Most of the steps above cost time, not money. Claiming Yelp, fixing your name and number across profiles and asking for Google reviews is an afternoon plus a habit. If that's where you are, do it yourself this week. A freelancer can add the sameAs markup for less than a month of ours — that's a real answer.

What we do is the ongoing part: the service pages written to be quoted, the review requests going out every week, the list outreach, and the monthly run of your five questions with a record of who got named. That's Website & Search at $1,000 a month, and our AI SEO page lists what's in it. Search takes about 90 days to move, and AI answers tend to follow search, so expect the same wait. You'll see what's shipping every week before then.

Sources

Find out who ChatGPT names instead of you

Book a free consultation and we'll bring the answers ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity give for your category and city today, and which sources they leaned on. For the background, read what generative engine optimization is and AI SEO for small business.