How to get your local business recommended by ChatGPT and other AI assistants

First, what an AI assistant is working from

When someone asks an assistant for "a good plumber near Puyallup", the answer comes from two places. One is what the model absorbed in training, which is slow to change and which you cannot edit. The other, when the assistant has web search switched on, is pages it fetches at the moment of the question. You can influence the second one directly and the first one only slowly.

That is also why the answers vary. Ask the same question twice and you can get different businesses. Treat any single answer as a sample, not a ranking.

1. Have a website that states the facts in text

An assistant can only repeat what it can read. Put your business name, what you do, the areas you serve, your phone number, address and hours on the page as ordinary text. A menu that exists only as a photo or a PDF, or a phone number that exists only inside an image, is invisible to most of what reads the web.

Say specific things plainly: "water heater replacement in Puyallup and Sumner" is more useful than "quality service you can trust". If you serve several towns or offer several services, a short page for each is better than one page that mentions everything.

2. Do not block the crawlers that feed AI answers

Check your robots.txt (it is at yourdomain.com/robots.txt). Some site builders and security plugins block AI crawlers by default, and a blocked page cannot be quoted. The common ones are:

• OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, which OpenAI uses for ChatGPT search and for fetching a page when a user asks.
• GPTBot, which OpenAI uses to collect training data. Blocking it affects future models, not today's search answers.
• ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity) and Google-Extended (Google's control for Gemini training).

Whether to allow training crawlers is your call. If you want to be findable, make sure the search-and-fetch ones are not blocked.

3. Mark the facts up in a form machines read

Structured data (JSON-LD) says the same facts a second time in a form software does not have to interpret. It is a small block of code in your page. There is a worked example, with a template to copy, in how to add LocalBusiness schema markup.

4. Make every listing say the same thing

Your name, address and phone number should be identical on your website, your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, Facebook and any trade directory. When sources disagree, an assistant has to guess which is right, and a business with conflicting details is easier to skip than one whose details agree everywhere.

5. Get mentioned by real local sources

Assistants lean on what other sites say about you: local news, the chamber of commerce, supplier and partner pages, neighbourhood directories, real customer reviews. These are slow to earn and cannot be faked at any scale that works, which is the reason they count. A few genuine mentions beat a long list of empty directory entries.

Check it yourself

Write five questions a customer would really ask, for example "best emergency plumber in Puyallup" or "where can I get a sourdough loaf near Sumner". Ask each one in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, with web search on and off, and ask each a few times. Record whether you are named, who is named instead, and what the assistant says about you. Repeat monthly.

• If you are named with the wrong facts, fix the source the assistant is reading, which is usually an old listing.
• If you are never named but competitors are, look at what their pages state that yours does not.
• If the assistant says you have no website and you do, it either could not read the site or found nothing that tied it to your business.

That manual check is exactly what we do at scale. Our free check is a person reading a real scan of your business, and the AI Visibility Index shows which local businesses the assistants currently name in each market we have measured. We sell audits and websites, so weigh our view accordingly; the five steps above cost nothing.