How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity

By the Oski Marketing team · Updated 5 October 2026 · 6 min read

To get recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, make sure their search crawlers can read your website, keep your business details identical everywhere they appear, earn genuine reviews, and publish plain pages that answer the questions customers ask. These assistants search the web and summarise what they find, so they recommend businesses that are easy to find and easy to trust.

How do AI assistants choose which local businesses to recommend?

AI assistants choose businesses by searching the web in real time, reading the pages and listings that come back, and summarising the ones that best match the question. They do not keep a private list of approved firms. OpenAI's help centre says ChatGPT can search the web and use location information to find local results, that it sometimes rewrites a question into queries sent to other search providers, and that "placement is not guaranteed". Perplexity says it searches the internet in real time and gives numbered citations to its sources.

Gemini sits inside Google's own products. In Google Maps, for example, Gemini can find places near you or your destination. That means the signals Google already uses for local results still matter: Google says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and how well known a business is.

What do ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity read about your business?

They read what is publicly available and crawlable: your website, your Google Business Profile and other listings, review sites, directories, local news and any page that mentions you. ChatGPT's help centre says it may share an approximate location with trusted third-party providers that supply local information such as business listings.

The practical point is that an assistant builds its answer from many sources at once. If your website says you cover Croydon and Sutton, your profile says Croydon only, and an old directory lists a different phone number, you look less certain than a competitor whose details agree everywhere.

Can AI assistants actually read your website?

Only if you let their search crawlers in, and many small business sites block them without knowing. Each company publishes the name of its crawler:

OpenAI also says your host or content delivery network must allow traffic from its published search crawler addresses. Our guide to robots.txt and AI crawlers shows how to check this in a few minutes.

What makes an AI assistant trust one business over another?

Consistency, reviews and clear facts. Bing's updated guidelines, as reported by Search Engine Journal, recommend stating facts directly and keeping entity names consistent, with one topic per page and the key information near the top. Google's local ranking guidance says that more reviews and positive ratings can help, and that complete, accurate information makes a business more likely to appear.

For a plumber in Wimbledon, that means the same business name, address or service area, phone number and opening hours on the website, Google Business Profile, Facebook page, trade body listing and any directories. It means reviews that mention the actual work ("replaced our combi boiler in a day") because those words help match you to specific questions.

What should your website say so AI tools can quote it?

Your website should state plainly what you do, where, for whom, and how to book, in sentences an assistant can lift. Vague lines such as "quality solutions for all your needs" give an AI tool nothing to work with. Try this pattern near the top of each service page:

"We repair and service gas boilers across Croydon, Sutton and Purley. We are Gas Safe registered, and most repairs are booked within two working days. Call or book online."

Then add short sections that answer real questions in their first sentence: how much a typical job costs (if you can say), what areas you cover, whether you work evenings, what happens on the first visit. Google says there are no special optimisations needed for its AI features beyond normal good practice, and that you do not need new AI text files or markup. Clear, accurate pages are the foundation for all of them.

How do you get mentioned on other websites?

Earn mentions where customers and local journalists already look. Assistants draw on many sources, so a business mentioned by a local news site, a trade body directory and a community group page is easier to recommend than one that only describes itself. Honest ways to get there:

1. Make sure you are listed, with identical details, in your trade body or accreditation scheme's directory.
2. Join and complete profiles on the main review and directory sites your customers use.
3. Sponsor or help with something local and ask for a mention on the organiser's site.
4. Offer a useful quote or tip to local news when they cover a topic you know, such as frozen pipes in a cold snap.
5. Ask suppliers or partner businesses you work with if they list recommended installers or partners.

Never pay for fake reviews or buy links. Beyond the legal risk, it undermines the trust signals you are trying to build.

How do you know if it is working?

Test it directly, with the same prompts each month. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot the questions your customers would ask, such as "Who is a good emergency electrician in Bromley?", and log which businesses come up and which sources are cited. Our step-by-step guide to checking if AI recommends your business gives a full set of prompts and a simple log sheet, and our AI search visibility checklist covers every fix in order. If you would rather we ran the test and wrote up the fixes for you, that is the kind of work we do at Oski Marketing.

What to do this week

• Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini "Who is a good [your service] in [your town]?" and write down who they name and which pages they cite.
• Open yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt and check it does not block OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot or Bingbot.
• Rewrite the first two sentences of your homepage to say what you do, where, and how to book.
• Check your business name, phone number and hours match on your website, Google Business Profile and Facebook page.
• Ask your three most recent happy customers for a Google review that mentions the job you did.