How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

The short answer

ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity answer a question like “best dentist in Austin” by running a web search, reading a handful of pages, and naming whichever businesses those pages support. There is no profile to claim and no ad to buy. What changes the answer is what is on your website and what other sites say about you — the same two things a search engine has always looked at, read by a different kind of reader.

That reader is a program fetching your HTML, not a person scrolling a page. It reads text before JavaScript runs, it reads structured data (JSON-LD) as fact rather than as decoration, and it can only cite a page it was allowed to fetch in the first place. Everything below follows from that.

The eight things that decide the answer

These are the checks ClientRadar's own fix engine runs against a business's site after every scan (see “Why ChatGPT doesn't mention your business” for the detail on each one). In rough order of how often they turn out to be the actual blocker:

• Citations — whether other sites the engines already trust (directories, review sites, local press) mention you at all.
• robots.txt — whether it blocks the specific crawlers that fetch citations (see “Is your robots.txt blocking AI search engines?”).
• LocalBusiness or Organization schema (JSON-LD) with a name, phone and address that match what you tell customers.
• A page whose title or heading actually names the service someone asked about — “roof replacement in Dallas”, not just “Services”.
• FAQ content, as visible text or FAQPage schema, since engines lift FAQ answers almost verbatim.
• HTTPS, served without redirect trouble.
• A page that renders its text in the raw HTML, not only after JavaScript runs.
• An llms.txt file (this site's own is at /llms.txt) that states plainly what the business is and does.

Where to start

Run a free scan first. It asks ChatGPT and Google AI Mode the questions your customers ask, with your city as the location, and shows whether you were named, who was named instead, and which of the eight things above the site check found missing. That turns this list from a checklist into a short, specific one for your actual site.

If nothing is obviously broken and you still aren't named, the gap is usually the first item: no one who already ranks with these engines mentions you yet. That's slower to fix than an HTML tag, and it's the one “Why ChatGPT doesn't mention your business” goes into next.