How to get your local business recommended by ChatGPT

How ChatGPT answers “who is the best roofer in Franklin”

It depends on whether search is in play. With search — which ChatGPT now uses on its own for questions that need current information — it runs web searches, reads a handful of pages and map-style listings, writes an answer and shows citations. For many local questions it presents businesses with their ratings and a map. Without search, it answers from what it learned in training, which is older and thinner, and it tends to name the businesses that were most consistently described across the web when the model was trained.

Either way the winning business is the one the web describes clearly and consistently. The difference is that with search, changes you make show up as soon as its crawler has read them; without search, they show up in the next model.

Step 1: let it in

OpenAI uses several crawlers, and they are named in your robots.txt or they are not. OAI-SearchBot fetches pages to build search answers; GPTBot gathers pages for training; ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a person asks ChatGPT to open it. Many sites block all bots they do not recognize, or run a security plugin that does, and are then surprised to be absent from the answers. Allow the three by name, keep the private paths disallowed, and check that the page renders its text in the HTML rather than painting it in with a script the bot will not run.

The free scan reports whether a site’s robots.txt admits the AI agents and whether the important content is in the HTML.

Step 2: one entity

Pick the exact business name, the one description, the list of services and the service area, and repeat them identically: the site, the Google Business Profile, Apple and Bing maps, the directories, the review sites, the association pages. Then say the same thing in structured data — Organization or LocalBusiness with the same name, address, phone, area and a sameAs list pointing at your profiles — so a machine can connect the site to the listings without guessing.

The failure mode is common and quiet: “Smith Roofing LLC” on the site, “Smith Roofing & Construction” on the profile, an old phone number on two directories. To a model that is three businesses, and none of them is trusted enough to recommend.

Step 3: be on the sources it cites

Ask ChatGPT for your trade in your city and look at the citations. They are usually a mix of the Business Profile and map data, review sites, general directories, a trade-specific directory or two, a local news or community site, and one or two business websites. That list is your listings plan: every source it cited that you are not on is a place to be, with the same facts as everywhere else.

The free AI answer check reports the sources Google’s AI Mode drew on for the same question; the full report we prepare records them for five engines.

Step 4: publish what it can quote

A generative engine cites the page that gave it a fact. Give it facts: a page per service that says what the job involves, how long it takes, what it includes and what it does not; a page per city you want work from that says you work there and shows it; an about page that says who you are, how long you have done this, what you are licensed for. FAQ blocks with the questions you get on the phone. An llms.txt file that states the whole entity on one page. Vague pages are not cited because there is nothing in them to cite.

Step 5: reviews it can read

ChatGPT reads reviews the way it reads everything else — as text. A steady flow of Google reviews that describe the work and the town, answered by you, is evidence of exactly the kind it is looking for. Ask every customer; reply to every review; never pay for or fabricate one, which violates every platform’s terms and, when detected, removes the trust the rest of the work built.

Step 6: ask it, monthly

Write down five or six questions your customers would ask — “best roofing contractor in Franklin, TN,” “who should I call for a roof leak in Brentwood,” “roof replacement companies near Spring Hill with good reviews” — and ask ChatGPT each of them on the first of the month. Record whether you were named, whether your site was cited, and who else was. Do the same in Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google’s AI Mode. That table, month over month, is the only honest measure of whether the work is working.

This is what the AI SEO program does for a client every month, and what the report shows beside the leads.

What not to do

• Do not write “the best roofer in Franklin” about yourself on every page. Engines discount self-praise and look for what others say.
• Do not buy reviews, listings or links. Corroboration only counts when it is independent.
• Do not put hidden text or instructions for the model on your pages. Serious engines strip or penalize it.
• Do not build a page for every town with the name swapped. A model reads them as one page and as a reason to trust the site less.
• Do not block the crawlers and then wonder why you are absent.