Guides · October 17, 2026 · Matthew Merrick

How to get your local business recommended by ChatGPT

People search “how to get my business recommended by ChatGPT” because a customer now asks a chat window who to call. ChatGPT does not offer a form that adds a local business, and it does not sell a place inside the answer.

OpenAI’s help center says any public website can appear in ChatGPT search when OAI-SearchBot is allowed to read it. The same page says placement is not guaranteed. The work is to make the facts easy to check, then look at what the answer actually cited.

There is no ChatGPT listing to claim

Search results for this question all land on the same point. Guides from local-SEO companies, “AI visibility” products, and OpenAI’s own publisher FAQ agree: you do not submit the business to ChatGPT. The assistant answers from pages and listings it can read.

That is different from Google Business Profile and Bing Places, which are real listings you claim. Do those too. They are not a ChatGPT account.

Let ChatGPT read the website

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. You want OAI-SearchBot to be allowed on the pages that describe the business. OpenAI uses that crawler for search. GPTBot is a different crawler, used around training. Blocking GPTBot does not, by itself, remove a site from ChatGPT search.

A host, firewall, or security plugin can block the crawler even when robots.txt looks open. If a page is only a picture of your hours, or the hours load after a script runs, a crawler can miss them. Put the name, what you do, the towns you serve, the phone, and the hours in normal text on the homepage and the contact page.

Google says its own AI features have no extra requirements and no special AI file. A page still has to be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet. You do not need a secret file named for ChatGPT.

Say the same facts everywhere

ChatGPT is cautious about a business that appears only on its own website. On local questions it also reads listings, review sites, and directories. Write the official name, address or service area, and phone once. Copy that text into:

• The website footer and contact page
• The Google Business Profile you already have, or a new one only if you do not have one
• Bing Places, which is the map listing, at bing.com/forbusiness
• The directories customers in your trade already use

If the phone on the site and the phone on Google differ by one digit, you look like two businesses. Fix the digit. Do not add the city to the business name to chase a keyword. Google’s representation guidelines want the real name.

Ask the question a customer would ask

In a private window, ask ChatGPT who it recommends for your trade in your town. Then ask Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot the same thing. Write down three things: whether you were named, whether the phone and hours were right, and which links the answer showed.

Those links are the job. A wrong hour on a cited listing gets corrected on that listing. A competitor named for a service you offer is a prompt to put that service in text, on Google, and in a real review that mentions the work. The question list is a longer version of this check.

BrightLocal’s September 2026 study of about 200,000 local prompts found the list of named businesses changes when you ask again. Overlap between repeats was roughly 20 to 33 percent depending on the tool. Ask more than once before you decide you are “in” or “out.”

What to do this week

1. Write the official name, address or service area, phone, and hours on paper.
2. Update the existing Google Business Profile so it matches that paper. The Google profile guide is the field list.
3. Submit the website to Bing and claim Bing Places. The Bing guide separates those two jobs. Copilot reads Bing.
4. Check robots.txt for OAI-SearchBot, and check that the homepage states the facts in text.
5. Run the customer question and save the sources.

You can do every step in a normal browser. A chatbot can draft a description only from facts you typed. You still paste it, and you still press save in Google and Bing.

Sources

• OpenAI, Publishers and developers FAQ
• OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers
• Google, AI features and your website
• BrightLocal, local AI visibility study, September 16, 2026

This page is educational. It is not legal, tax, or financial advice, and it is not affiliated with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Apple, or Perplexity. No one can guarantee that any assistant will recommend, mention, or rank a business.