How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business?

Ask ChatGPT a question and it either answers from what its model learnt in training, or it searches the web and answers from what comes back. OpenAI says it searches by itself when a question might benefit from information on the web, and that it can use your approximate location to find local results.

The first kind is slow to change. What a model learnt was settled when it was trained, and nothing you publish this week reaches it. The second kind is assembled from pages that exist now, which makes it the half of the problem a small business can actually work on.

You can usually tell which one you got. An answer that used a search comes with links to the pages it drew on, and those links are worth more than the answer itself.

According to OpenAI’s help pages, ChatGPT rewrites the question into one or more targeted searches, which it may send to other search providers it partners with, and its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, finds websites to show in ChatGPT’s search features. OpenAI also says that any public website can appear in ChatGPT search, however small the business behind it.

The names in an answer therefore come from the pages those searches return, and few of those pages are yours. Directories and listings, review sites, the local paper, a trade body’s register, a supplier’s list of stockists, the programme for the town’s food festival. Your own website is one voice among them, and often a quiet one.

OpenAI does not publish how ChatGPT chooses between the businesses it finds, and nobody outside OpenAI knows the weighting. Google is more open about its own AI features. It says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear as a link in them, and that optimising for them is still search engine optimisation. The first test is the same everywhere: can an ordinary search find you?

A recommendation is something a person may act on, so it is safer to make when more than one page backs it up. It is how a person weighs up a business they have never used, and a sensible way to think about an assistant, though OpenAI does not describe its method. Google does say, of its own local results, that it judges how prominent a business is partly from information about it elsewhere on the web: links, articles and directories.

An invented example shows the difference. A heating engineer in Caernarfon has a website saying they fit heat pumps across Arfon and Ynys Môn. Their trade body lists them. The local paper mentioned them when they took on an apprentice. Their listings give the same name, number and address as the site. Four independent pages tell one story, and a search has several ways to reach it.

Now take a rival whose website is a photo gallery and a mobile number, with one listing that still shows last year’s address, and nothing else. They may be the better engineer. Nothing in the search results says so.

Most of this is work you would do for your customers anyway, and none of it needs a specialist. Start with the first item, because it can quietly cancel everything else.

OpenAI treats search and training as separate choices. GPTBot collects pages that may be used to train its models, and OAI-SearchBot finds pages for ChatGPT search. You can refuse the first and allow the second, and OpenAI says a change to robots.txt takes about a day to reach its systems. The free assessment on this site reads your robots.txt and tells you if it shuts AI crawlers out.

If you trade in both languages, publish in both. OpenAI does not say what language its rewritten searches are in, so naming your services and your area in Welsh and in English gives a search in either language something to find.

When you test this yourself, the list of names is the least useful part of the result. Open the links that come with the answer and note which pages ChatGPT drew on. Those are the places your customers’ questions lead, and they show you where you need to be listed and what needs correcting.

Ask the way your customers do, in both languages: “Pwy sy’n gosod pympiau gwres yng Nghaernarfon?” as well as “heat pump installer near Caernarfon”. If a directory you have never updated keeps coming up, it is part of your shop window whether you chose it or not, so claim the entry and correct it.

Expect the answer to move. OpenAI says ChatGPT uses approximate location for local results and warns that search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect, so people asking the same thing in different places can see different names. Checking monthly shows you a trend; checking daily mostly shows you noise.

Nobody outside OpenAI can guarantee you a place in ChatGPT’s answers, because nobody outside OpenAI decides them. Be wary of anyone selling one, and of packages built on mentions bought by the hundred. Google’s own guide to its AI features says that seeking inauthentic mentions across the web is not as helpful as it might seem.

Telling ChatGPT about your business in your own chats is not a shortcut either. OpenAI’s example of memory shows saved details shaping the searches ChatGPT runs for that same person. Nothing in it suggests a route into the answers other people get.

What you can do is make the true version of your business easy to find and easy to check, in both of your languages. That does not guarantee a recommendation. It removes the reasons for leaving you out, or at least the ones that are yours to remove.