Will ChatGPT recommend your business?

A referral used to be visible. Someone searched, your site came up or it did not, and Search Console showed you the whole story.

Now a growing share of "who should I call" questions never touch a results page. The customer asks ChatGPT for a roofer who handles insurance claims, or asks Perplexity for the best med spa near their office, and the assistant answers with three names and a sentence about each. If your business is one of the three, you get a call that no analytics tool will ever attribute properly. If it is not, you will never know the conversation happened.

You cannot buy your way into that answer. But you can make yourself easy to include, and most of your competitors have not done the work.

How assistants decide who to name

There is no single AI ranking to win. An assistant naming businesses is drawing on a few sources at once.

First, live web search. When you ask ChatGPT or Claude for a recommendation, they usually run a search behind the scenes and read the results, which means the pages that rank for ordinary searches still matter. Second, the open web they were trained on: directories, review sites, news mentions, "best plumber in Calgary" roundups. Third, structured sources like your Google Business Profile and the review platforms, which get surfaced through the search layer.

Notice what is common across all three. The assistant can only repeat what is written down somewhere it can read. A business that exists mostly as a Facebook page and word of mouth is invisible to this entire channel.

Test it before you fix anything

Before changing anything, find out where you stand. Open a fresh session in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, and ask the way a customer would: "who does furnace repair in Barrie", "best auto detailing near downtown Halifax", "recommend a family law firm in Ottawa". Ask three or four variations. Then ask each assistant directly what it knows about your business by name.

You will land in one of three places. The assistant names you and gets the details right. The assistant knows you exist but describes you vaguely or wrongly. Or you simply do not come up. Each has a different fix, and knowing which you are saves you from doing the wrong work.

Let the crawlers in

The bluntest way to disappear from AI answers is to block the crawlers that feed them. OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and the rest identify themselves with user agents like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot, and they respect robots.txt. Plenty of sites blocked all of them in 2023 on principle, or inherited a blanket block from a template or a security plugin, and forgot.

Check your robots.txt. If you sell to the public and want to be recommended, the AI crawlers should be allowed everywhere your normal pages live. Ours are, deliberately, and we publish the full list in the open. Blocking them protects nothing on a marketing site. There is no secret on your services page. There is only the choice between being in the answer and not.

Say what you do in plain text

Assistants read like impatient strangers. Text rendered by JavaScript widgets, service lists locked inside images, hours that exist only in a PDF, none of that reliably survives the trip into an answer.

The fix is the same unglamorous work that ordinary SEO has always rewarded. One page per service, written in sentences. Your city and service area in real text instead of a map embed. A clear statement of what you do, who you do it for, and where, near the top of the homepage. Structured data that marks up your name, address, phone, hours, and services so machines do not have to guess. If you have ever wondered whether that markup was worth it, this is the channel where it quietly pays off.

The same structural problems that keep you out of Google keep you out of AI answers, so if you have not read why your business isn't showing up on Google, start there. The overlap is not a coincidence. The assistants are standing on the same web.

The rest of the web has to agree you exist

When an assistant is deciding whether to name you, corroboration matters. A business that appears on its own site, on a claimed Google Business Profile, on Yelp, on the local chamber list, and in a trade directory, with the same name and phone number everywhere, looks real. A business whose details disagree across listings looks risky to recommend, and assistants are tuned to avoid confidently recommending things that might be wrong.

Reviews carry particular weight because they are third-party text about you, in volume. So do "best X in city" articles, which assistants lean on heavily when they compose shortlists. You cannot write those yourself, but you can be the kind of business that ends up in them: claimed profiles, steady reviews, a site worth linking to.

What llms.txt actually does

You may have heard about llms.txt, a plain-text file that gives AI systems a curated summary of who you are and what your key pages say. We publish one for our own site. It is cheap to add and it makes an assistant's job easier when it does visit.

Honest framing: it is a courtesy, not a lever. No file on your own server outweighs what the rest of the web says about you. Add it after the fundamentals are right, not instead of them.

Where this is heading

Nobody sensible will promise you a number one spot inside ChatGPT, because no such spot exists to sell. What exists is a gap. Most small businesses have done none of this, which means the ones that get the fundamentals right are competing for AI recommendations against almost nobody.

This is the work our AI visibility service covers: the crawler audit, the plain-text and structured-data pass, the citation cleanup, and a before-and-after record of what the major assistants say about you. If you would rather just find out where you stand first, send us your URL. The audit covers your AI visibility alongside everything else, comes back written, and is yours to keep either way.