You get recommended by ChatGPT the same way you get recommended by a well-informed local: your business has to be easy to find, easy to understand, and described the same way everywhere the AI looks. There is no submission form and no paid placement for this. There is a short list of unglamorous fixes that decide whether the AI names you or names your competitor.
This matters more than it did last year. In one recent consumer survey, 45% of U.S. consumers said they had asked an AI tool to recommend a local business in the past year — up from 6% the year before. Only about 13% of small business owners are actively doing anything about it. That gap is the opportunity: in most local markets, the businesses that fix the basics now will be the names the AI learns first.
First, see where you stand
Step 1: Ask the question yourself. Open ChatGPT in a private (incognito) browser window and type what a customer would type: “What’s the best [what you do] in [your town]?” Do the same in Perplexity and in Google. Write down the names that come up. If you’re not one of them, don’t panic — most businesses aren’t yet. That list is your scoreboard, and everything below is about getting on it.
| Source | What the AI takes from it | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | Name, category, hours, location — the core identity | Claim it and fix the core facts |
| Reviews | Whether strangers trust you — and how current that trust is | A steady ask system; respond to every review |
| Your website | Services and service area, in plain words | A clear page or section per service, with the town named |
| Directories & social profiles | Confirmation — the same facts, repeated back | Hunt down mismatches and fix them |
Fix the sources the AI actually reads
ChatGPT and the other AI tools don’t keep their own list of local businesses. They build answers from your Google Business Profile, your website, your reviews, directory listings, and articles or mentions about you on other sites. When those sources agree with each other, the AI trusts them. When they don’t — an old address here, a different phone number there, a website that never says what you actually do — the AI moves on to a business it can describe with confidence.
Step 2: Complete your Google Business Profile, every field. Your profile is the single biggest source AI tools cite for local businesses. Claim it if you haven’t, then fill in everything: exact business name, address, phone, hours, services, photos, and a description that says plainly what you do and who you do it for. Keep the hours current — an AI that sends a customer to a closed business stops trusting that listing.
Step 3: Claim your Bing Places listing. ChatGPT leans heavily on Microsoft’s Bing index. Most owners have never logged into Bing Places, which is exactly why it’s an easy win. Claim the listing, and make sure the name, address, phone, and services match your Google profile word for word.
Step 4: Make your website answer questions in plain language. AI tools quote pages that say things clearly. Give each main service its own page that answers, in the first few lines: what it is, who it’s for, where you do it, and roughly what it costs. Add a short FAQ page built from the questions customers actually ask you before they hire you — priced, timed, and answered honestly. Skip the slogans. “Welcome to our website, we’re passionate about service” tells an AI nothing it can use.
Step 5: Treat reviews like a steady job, not a campaign. The AI reads your review profile the way a customer does: how many, how recent, and whether you respond. Ask every happy customer, every time, as part of how the job wraps up — not in a begging email three weeks later. Reply to reviews, good and bad. A business with 80 reviews and replies looks alive; a business with 300 silent reviews from 2022 looks like a snapshot.
Step 6: Get mentioned on other people’s websites. Most of what AI tools say about a business comes from third-party pages, not the business’s own site. Local news stories, chamber and directory listings, partner businesses that link to you, community pages — each one is another source the AI can cross-check. This doesn’t require a PR budget. It requires being listed accurately in the places your town already looks, and giving local outlets something real to write about when you do something newsworthy.
Step 7: Don’t accidentally block the door. Check that your website loads quickly on a phone and that your site’s settings aren’t blocking search and AI crawlers — some security plugins and cheap hosting setups block them by default. If you didn’t build your site, ask whoever did one question: “Is anything blocking bots from reading our pages?” The answer should be no.
Step 8: Re-test once a month. Repeat Step 1 on the same day each month and write down who gets named. AI answers change as your sources improve, and the scoreboard tells you whether the work is landing. Ten minutes, once a month, no software required.
What this looks like in practice
We recently benchmarked how AI tools answer recommendation questions across 30 service categories in one regional market, testing which local businesses the AI actually named. The pattern was consistent: the businesses recommended weren’t always the ones ranked first on Google. They were the ones whose name, services, and details matched everywhere — profile, website, reviews, and third-party mentions all telling the same story. Businesses with a strong Google ranking but a thin, inconsistent footprint elsewhere were simply absent from the answers. The good news in that result is that almost everything on that list is fixable by the owner, for free, in a weekend.
When to hire this out
Everything above is genuinely doable yourself, and you should do the free parts today regardless of who you hire. Hire it out when one of these is true:
Your test in Step 1 shows competitors being named and you can’t tell why. Your business information is scattered across old listings, old addresses, or a website you can’t update yourself. Or you want the benchmark treatment: a structured test of how AI tools answer the questions your customers ask, a fix list in priority order, and someone to work through it and re-test until your name shows up.
That’s the work we do. It isn’t magic and it isn’t instant — AI visibility builds over weeks as the sources update — but it compounds, and right now most of your competitors haven’t started.
AI FOR APPALACHIA
Book a Free Consultation
A consultation is a working session, not a sales pitch — and it’s free. We test how ChatGPT and Google’s AI currently answer the questions your customers ask, show you exactly who they’re recommending instead, and leave you with a prioritized fix list — whether you hire us to work it or take it back to your own team.
We talk first. If there’s work to do together, we’ll talk numbers on the call, once we understand what you actually need.
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