How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business?

You cannot pay for it and you cannot instruct it. What you can do is be legible: a page that states plainly what you do, where, and for whom, in text rather than in images; structured data describing the business; consistent details across the web; and third-party pages that mention you. Assistants assemble answers from what is readable and corroborated.

Does AI search replace Google for small businesses?

Not yet, and possibly not ever entirely. But a meaningful share of the questions that used to start a search now get answered without one, and a business that is invisible to that layer loses those enquiries silently — there is no ranking report showing you what you did not appear in.

What is the single most useful thing to do?

Put the facts in text. An enormous number of small business sites carry their most important information — services, areas covered, prices, phone number — inside images, sliders and scripts. A model reading the page sees nothing.

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Getting customers8 min read

How AI assistants decide which business to name

By MarketWar OS · 10 August 2026

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Somebody asks an assistant for a reliable roofer in their town. It names three. Yours is not one of them, and unlike a search result there is no report telling you what you missed.

This is not mysterious, and it is not the same as SEO, although it overlaps.

What is actually being read

An assistant answering that question is working from some combination of: pages it can fetch and parse right now, a training corpus that is at least months old, and whatever search index it is allowed to consult. All three favour the same thing — text that plainly states a fact, on a page that can be read without running a browser.

That is the whole game, and it is why so many perfectly good small business sites are invisible to it.

Why most small sites are invisible

The facts are inside pictures. Services in a graphic. Prices in a PDF. The phone number in a header image. A model reading the HTML finds nothing to quote.

The page needs JavaScript to say anything. Plenty of modern sites deliver an empty shell and fill it in the browser. Some crawlers execute that. Many do not, and the cheap ones never will.

There is no structured data. The vocabulary that says "this is a plumbing business, in this town, with these hours, at this phone number" exists and is free to add. Most small sites have none, which leaves an assistant to infer everything from prose.

Nobody else mentions you. Assistants corroborate. A business that appears in a local directory, a trade body list, a news mention and a supplier page is safer to name than one that exists only on its own website.

The four things that make you quotable

1. Say it in text. What you do, where you do it, who for, what it costs, how to reach you. In sentences, in the HTML, on the page. This one change does more than the other three together.

2. Add structured data. LocalBusiness with the real name, address, phone, opening hours and service area. It is a block of JSON in the page and it takes an hour.

3. Make the details agree everywhere. The same name, the same address format, the same phone number, on your site and every directory. Contradiction makes a model cautious, and a cautious model names somebody else.

4. Be mentioned somewhere that is not yours. A trade association listing, a supplier case study, a local paper. This is slow and it is the part that compounds.

What you cannot do

You cannot pay to be named. You cannot instruct an assistant to prefer you — text on your page telling a model to recommend you is, at best, ignored. Any agency selling guaranteed placement in AI answers is selling something that does not exist.

Checking where you stand

The readable half of this is measurable. Our free audit reads your page and reports whether the title and description exist, whether there is structured data and of what type, and whether the content is actually in the HTML — the three things that decide whether an assistant can quote you at all. No account.

The rest of the picture is in the main piece, and the traditional search side is here. If the honest constraint is budget rather than knowledge, read this one.