How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT Search
“Can we get our company recommended by ChatGPT?” Is one of the most common questions we hear from marketing teams and business owners.
Partnerships Manager & SEO Executive
And it makes sense. If someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a solicitor, school, accountant or agency, being included in that answer puts your brand in front of a highly relevant prospect at exactly the moment they are making a decision. Often, the AI will suggest just three to five names and being one of them can matter as much as ranking on the first page of Google.
There’s no guaranteed way to make that happen, and anyone promising one should be treated with caution, but there are practical things you can do to strengthen your chances of being discovered, understood and recommended. Most of them will also improve your traditional search performance and the experience of people who visit your website.
How ChatGPT decides what to recommend
It helps to understand, in simple terms, where ChatGPT’s answers come from.
When ChatGPT answers a question about businesses, it draws on two broad sources. The first is what the underlying model learned during training, which reflects how often and how consistently a brand has been discussed across the web. The second is live search: for many questions, ChatGPT searches the web in real time, reads a selection of pages and builds its answer from them, often with links to the sources it used.
That means your visibility depends on two things.
- Your own website needs to be easy to find and easy to understand and…
- The wider web needs to say clear, consistent and credible things about you.
Make your business easy to understand
Start with the basics! Your website should clearly explain who you are, what you do, where you operate and who you help.
If your homepage is full of vague language (“we deliver innovative solutions that drive growth”), it becomes harder for both people and machines to understand your business. AI tools are trying to match a specific question to a specific provider so, if they can’t work out what you actually offer, you won’t be part of the answer.
Some practical checks:
- State your services plainly. Use the words your customers use, not internal jargon.
- Be clear about location and audience. If you work with businesses in Surrey, or want to attract customers from across the UK, say so.
- Give each core service its own page. One page trying to cover everything is harder to understand than several focused ones.
- Keep your details consistent. Your name, address, services and description should match across your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directory listings.
- Use structured data. Schema markup for your organisation, services, reviews and FAQs helps machines interpret your content accurately.
Clarity matters more than cleverness.
Create content around real customer questions
People often use AI differently from Google. Instead of typing “SEO agency Surrey”, they might ask: “Which Surrey marketing agencies offer both SEO and paid social, and work with professional services firms?”
These questions are longer, more specific and closer to a buying decision. Your content should reflect that.
Think about the decisions prospects make before contacting you, then answer them properly:
- What does this service cost, and what affects the price?
- How long does it take to see results?
- How do you compare with the alternatives?
- Who is this a good fit for, and who isn’t it right for?
- What does working with you actually look like?
Answer the question directly near the top of the page, then add the detail. Clear headings, short paragraphs and well written FAQs make it easier for AI tools to pick out the relevant part of a page. A good source of questions is your own sales and enquiry team: the questions they hear every week are the ones prospects are asking AI too.
Build genuine authority
AI visibility is unlikely to come from your website alone. When ChatGPT looks for recommendations, it tends to rely on sources it considers trustworthy, and it pays attention to what others say about you, not just what you say about yourself.
PR coverage, respected industry directories, reviews, expert commentary, awards, partnerships and strong third party mentions all help build a clearer digital footprint. Comparison articles and “best of” lists in your sector can be particularly influential, because they are exactly the kind of content AI tools draw on when asked for a recommendation.
The aim isn’t to appear everywhere, it’s to appear in credible places that matter to your market. A mention in a respected trade publication or a well regarded regional business site is worth far more than dozens of low quality directory listings.
Reviews deserve particular attention. Encourage satisfied clients to leave detailed reviews on the platforms that matter in your sector, and respond to them: specific reviews that mention the service, the location and the outcome give AI tools useful context about what you’re good at.
Publish things competitors can’t copy
Generic advice is increasingly easy to create, and AI tools have little reason to cite a page that says the same thing as a hundred others. Original research, case studies, expert commentary and proprietary data are much more valuable.
A study such as “We Asked AI to Recommend 100 UK Brands: Here’s What We Learned” creates something useful and distinctive. It gives journalists a reason to cover you, gives other sites a reason to link to you and gives AI tools a reason to cite you. That supports SEO, PR and AI visibility at the same time.
Other ideas that work well:
- Detailed case studies with real numbers and named outcomes
- Annual surveys of your customers or industry
- Benchmarks drawn from your own data
- Clear, opinionated expert views on issues in your sector
If it couldn’t have been written by anyone else, it’s far more likely to be noticed.
Keep SEO foundations strong
Don’t abandon traditional SEO. Your website still needs to be technically healthy, crawlable, fast, well structured and useful. If search engines struggle to access or understand your site, AI tools that rely on search will struggle too.
A few points are specific to ChatGPT:
- Check your robots.txt file. Make sure you aren’t accidentally blocking OpenAI’s search crawler (OAI-SearchBot). Some sites blocked AI crawlers in bulk and lost visibility without realising.
- Don’t forget Bing. ChatGPT search draws on third party search providers, so make sure your site is indexed in Bing Webmaster Tools as well as Google Search Console.
- Make key content accessible. Important information hidden behind logins, inside images or loaded only through complex scripts may not be read.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) works best as an additional layer on top of good SEO, not a replacement for it.
Measure what happens
You can’t improve what you don’t track. Create a set of realistic customer questions, typically 20 to 50 depending on your business, and test them regularly across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude and other AI platforms.
For each question, record:
- Whether your brand appears
- Which competitors are mentioned
- How your business is described, and whether that description is accurate
- Which sources support the answer
The last point is especially useful, if the same publications, directories or review sites keep appearing as sources, those are the places where your presence matters most.
AI answers vary from one session to the next, so look for trends over weeks and months rather than reacting to a single result. Over time, this gives you a much clearer picture of your AI visibility and whether your efforts are working. You can also check your analytics for referral traffic from chatgpt.com and other AI platforms, and ask new enquiries how they found you.
Final thoughts
Getting recommended by ChatGPT isn’t about tricks or shortcuts. It comes from the same things that have always built strong brands online: being clear about what you do, answering your customers’ questions well, earning genuine recognition and creating content worth referencing.
The difference now is that the rewards for doing those things well are growing, and the cost of ignoring them is rising. Businesses that start building their AI visibility now will be in a far stronger position as more of their customers begin their search with a conversation rather than a list of links.
Find out how AI sees your organisation
At Air Social, we make sure your organisation is visible, understood, trusted and recommended across Google, ChatGPT and the emerging AI discovery ecosystem.
If you’re not sure where you stand, an AI visibility audit is the best place to start. We’ll test how your organisation appears when people ask AI tools the questions that matter to your market, show you which competitors are being recommended instead and identify the sources shaping those answers. You’ll come away with a clear picture of your current position and a prioritised plan for improving it.
