How to get your business to show up in ChatGPT

For local business owners · 4 min read

Let the ChatGPT crawler into your site, make every listing describe your business in the same words, and give it one page of facts that exist nowhere else. In our work with owners the first two fixes show up in ChatGPT within 30 to 45 days, and a piece in the local press keeps adding weight over 60 to 90 days.

ChatGPT is where a large share of people now start looking. When one of them asks for the best option in town, the names it offers come from a few sources it has learned to trust, and your own site is only one of them. If the directories and the local press describe you well, ChatGPT names you. If they do not, a beautiful website will not save you.

Start with the plumbing. Type your own address with /robots.txt on the end into a browser and look for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. If any of them sits under a Disallow line, the engines cannot read your pages, and you do not exist in the answer. Many Squarespace and Wix sites we audit have GPTBot blocked by an old privacy plugin, and the fix takes two minutes.

Next, add schema. Schema is a label inside the code that tells a machine what it is reading. A local business needs Organization, LocalBusiness and FAQPage on any page that answers common questions. Put the address and opening hours in there along with the price range. A developer needs about two hours, and most sites we look at have none of it.

Then make every listing agree. Open your Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, your Yelp page and the footer of your own site, and check that the name, address and category read the same way in all of them, down to the spelling. In our audits a mismatch is the most common reason ChatGPT declines to name a business at all. Write a real description for each one rather than one pasted tagline.

The step almost nobody takes pays off most. A blog post any business could have written is invisible to the engines, because the same words already sit on ten thousand other pages. A page with a fact only you could know is the one place online where that fact lives. A yoga studio, for example, could write down what share of its new members had never done yoga before. Any business has a number like that, and we ask owners for two such pages a quarter.

Press is the hardest step and it pays the most, because the engines trust what other people say about you far more than what you say about yourself. One quote in a roundup in your city's paper is enough to start turning up in answers, so pitch one journalist a month with a story built on your own numbers.

Perplexity is the fastest engine and picks up a robots.txt or schema fix within 7 to 14 days. ChatGPT and Claude take 30 to 45 days to absorb a change in listings or schema. Press pieces and original pages keep stacking up over 60 to 90 days as the models recrawl. What you see is a slow rise in customers who found you through ChatGPT, and that rise is the thing we watch for.

Those timings come from owners we have walked through this and from how often the engines appear to recrawl, so they are a working estimate rather than a controlled test. A business in a crowded city with strong chains around it can do all five steps and still wait longer. The steps raise your odds, and on their own they settle nothing.

To see where you stand before you start, our free Quick Check will ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity about your business and show you what each one says. It takes about 60 seconds and needs no email.