How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

When someone asks ChatGPT "who should I get to rewire my house in Adelaide," it does not list forty electricians. It names three or four. Getting onto that shortlist is not luck, and it is not a black box. It comes down to a handful of things you can do on purpose. Here is the playbook we use.

The short version

If you only do five things, do these:

1. Say plainly what you do and which suburbs you serve.
2. Earn a few mentions on sites the AI already trusts.
3. Publish pages that answer the exact questions buyers ask.
4. Keep your name, phone and service area identical everywhere.
5. Measure what AI actually says about you, across all four assistants.

The rest of this post is the detail behind each.

1. Make it obvious what you do and where

AI assistants recommend businesses they can describe in one sentence. If your homepage says "premium solutions for the modern Australian home," the model has nothing to repeat. If it says "ducted air conditioning installation across the northern suburbs of Perth," that is a sentence an assistant can hand to a customer.

Rewrite your opening line and your service pages in plain words. Name the service. Name the suburbs. Cut the adjectives. This single change helps AI, Google, and the human reading your site, which is rare for any one fix.

2. Earn mentions on sources AI trusts

When an assistant names you, it is leaning on what it has read about you elsewhere: a local news write-up, a genuine review thread, a reputable industry directory, a customer story. You do not need hundreds of these. You need a few, on pages the model already trusts.

One real feature in a local paper or a respected trade site is worth more than ten thin listings. Think about where your industry's credible coverage lives, and get into a few of those places.

3. Answer the questions buyers actually ask

Write the page that answers "how much does rewiring a house cost in Adelaide" if that is what your customers ask you. Put the plain question as a heading and the plain answer right underneath. Do that for the five questions you get asked most.

This is the highest-return work you can do, because the same pages that get cited by AI also rank in Google and reassure the customer reading them. If you want the longer reasoning here, we wrote it up in What is Answer Engine Optimisation?

4. Keep your details identical everywhere

Your site says "Smith & Co Electrical." Your Google profile says "Smith Electrical Adelaide." An old directory has a disconnected number. To you these are obviously the same business. To a model, the mismatch is a reason to hesitate, and a hesitant model recommends the business whose details line up.

Make the business name, phone number and service area identical across your website, your Google Business Profile, and every directory you appear on. It is dull work with a real payoff.

5. Earn reviews, and make them easy to read

Reviews do double duty. They feed the model evidence that you are real and well regarded, and they shape the language people use to describe you. Ask happy customers for a review and, where it fits, nudge them to mention the specific job and the suburb. "Great emergency electrician in Glenelg" is far more useful to an AI than "great service, thanks."

6. Check all four assistants, then measure

This is where most businesses are flying blind. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity do not agree with each other. You might be named on Perplexity and invisible on ChatGPT. Checking one and assuming the rest match is how people misread their position. We track all four every week for that reason.

Start with a baseline: run a free AI check to see how many answers mention you today and which competitors get named instead. Then look at the Australian AI Visibility Index to see who already leads your category in your city. You cannot improve what you cannot see, and the gap usually tells you exactly what to fix first.

A realistic timeline

This is a habit, not a switch. The businesses that win do the five things above and keep doing them. In our experience you start seeing movement in one or two assistants within a month or two, not overnight. If a competitor is beating you today, that is usually because they got a head start on these basics, not because they are better at the actual job. For the why behind that, see Why ChatGPT recommends your competitor.

Run your free check first so you have a number to beat, then work the list.