How to Get Your Business Mentioned in ChatGPT (7 Free Steps)

Facts and prices checked: October 2026

A customer opens ChatGPT and types: “Who is the best dog groomer near me that takes walk-ins?” They get three names and a short reason for each.

If your business is not one of those three, you did not lose a ranking. You were never in the conversation.

This is no longer a niche habit. In BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 45% of consumers said they used AI tools like ChatGPT for local business recommendations in the past year, up from 6% the year before. ChatGPT alone reached 900 million weekly users in February 2026, according to OpenAI.

The good news: AI assistants do not pick businesses at random. They read your website, your listings and what other sites say about you. Most of that you can fix in a few afternoons, for free.

LLMs derive their understanding of a brand’s authority from words on the page, from the prevalence of particular words, the co-occurrence of different terms and topics, and the context in which those words are used.

Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs, quoted in Ahrefs’ study of 75,000 brands

Here are the 7 steps, in the order we would do them.

Why Does ChatGPT Mention Some Businesses and Not Others?

When someone asks for a recommendation, ChatGPT usually searches the web in real time, reads a handful of pages and writes a short answer. So the question is simple: when it searches, does it find you, and does what it finds make you look like a safe pick?

Two studies show where that answer comes from:

• Your own website matters most for local searches. In BrightLocal’s study of 800 local searches in ChatGPT (November 2024), 58% of sources were business websites, 27% were sites that mention businesses and 15% were directories.
• Mentions beat links. In Ahrefs’ May 2025 study of 75,000 brands, brand mentions across the web had the strongest link to AI Overview visibility (0.664 correlation), far ahead of backlinks (0.218).
• Many brands are invisible. The same Ahrefs study found 26% of brands had zero mentions in AI Overviews.

Put simply: be easy to find, be easy to understand, and be talked about by others. Every step below serves one of those three.

Step 1: Check What AI Says About You Today

Before you change anything, find out where you stand. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google (look at the AI Overview at the top) and ask the questions a real customer would ask.

• “Best [your service] in [your city]”
• “[Your service] near [neighborhood] open on Saturday”
• “Affordable [your product] for [type of customer]”
• “What is [your business name] and is it any good?”

Write down three things for each answer: are you mentioned, who is mentioned instead, and which sources are cited. Those cited pages are your to-do list. If a competitor keeps showing up because of one “best of” article, that article is where you want to be too.

Checking by hand works for 5 to 10 questions. If you want it done every week across several AI assistants, a tracking tool saves the copy-pasting:

Step 2: Let the AI Crawlers Into Your Website

This is the step most owners skip, and it can quietly cancel everything else. If your site blocks AI crawlers, ChatGPT cannot read it.

OpenAI’s crawler documentation says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Perplexity says the same about PerplexityBot. Google’s AI Overviews use regular Googlebot, and Microsoft Copilot uses Bing’s index.

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser. If you see a “Disallow: /” line under any of these names, that bot is blocked. A safe setup looks like this:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /

Note the difference between two OpenAI bots. OAI-SearchBot decides whether you appear in ChatGPT search. GPTBot collects content for training future models. You can block GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to apply.

Check your firewall too. In July 2025, Cloudflare started blocking AI crawlers by default on the sites it protects. If your site uses Cloudflare, open its bot settings and allow the search crawlers you want. Some security plugins and hosts block bots in a similar way.

Tools that help: Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console (both free) show crawl errors and blocked pages.

Step 3: Claim and Clean Up Your Business Listings

For anything local (“near me”, “in Austin”, “open now”), AI assistants lean on business listings for your address, hours, phone number and reviews. Wrong details there become wrong answers in ChatGPT.

Microsoft says it plainly in its February 2026 announcement: registering with Bing Places helps keep your address, hours and contact details “eligible for inclusion in AI-generated responses.” Google’s guidance for AI features also tells site owners to keep their Business Profile up to date.

• Google Business Profile: Feeds Google Maps, AI Overviews and AI Mode. Add every service, your service area, real photos and correct hours.
• Bing Places for Business: Feeds Bing and Microsoft Copilot. You can import your Google profile in a few clicks.
• Apple Business: The replacement for Apple Business Connect. It controls how you appear in Apple Maps.
• Your niche directories: Yelp, Tripadvisor, Houzz, Clutch, Capterra, or whichever sites rank for your service. Pick the 5 to 10 that matter in your industry, not 100.

Use the exact same business name, address, phone number and website on every listing. “St.” on one and “Street” on another is fine. A different phone number or an old address is not.

Step 4: Make Your Website Easy for AI to Quote

AI assistants quote clear, specific sentences. A homepage that says “We deliver excellence with passion” gives them nothing to repeat. “We are a family-run bakery in Leeds that makes gluten-free birthday cakes, from £35, with 48 hours’ notice” gives them everything.

• One page per service: A dentist with one “Services” page loses to the one with separate pages for implants, whitening and emergency visits.
• Say who you are for: Write “best for” lines in plain words, such as “for busy parents” or “for restaurants with under 20 staff”. AI answers are full of these phrases.
• Show prices or price ranges: “From $120” or “Most jobs cost $300 to $600” helps AI answer “affordable” questions. Pages that hide prices often get skipped.
• Add a real FAQ section: Use the questions customers ask on the phone. Answer each in 1 to 3 sentences.
• Put key facts in text: Hours, service area and prices inside an image or PDF are hard for AI to read. Type them on the page.
• Add basic structured data: Organization or LocalBusiness schema (most SEO plugins add it for you) helps search engines match your name, address and hours. Google says it must match what is visible on the page.

Microsoft’s own advice for being cited in Copilot points the same way: clear headings, tables and FAQ sections, claims backed by data, and content kept fresh. Its free IndexNow protocol tells Bing the moment you update a page.

Step 5: Get Mentioned on Other Websites

This is the step with the biggest payoff. In the Ahrefs study, brands with the most web mentions earned up to 10 times more AI Overview mentions than the next group down. AI trusts what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself.

The mentions do not even need links. A line like “For walk-in grooming, try Happy Paws on Elm Street” in a local blog counts.

• Get into the lists AI already cites: Go back to the sources from Step 1. Email the authors of “best [service] in [city]” articles with one useful fact about you and a photo.
• Pitch local news and trade press: A new service, a local milestone or a useful tip for readers is enough for a short feature.
• Ask partners and suppliers: Many keep a “where to buy” or “our partners” page. Ask to be added.
• Show up in communities: Answer questions on Reddit, Facebook groups and industry forums under your real name. Be helpful first. Spammy self-promotion gets removed.
• Go on podcasts and webinars: Show notes and transcripts create mentions that stay online for years.

Step 6: Collect Fresh Reviews (and Reply to Them)

Reviews are proof that your business is real and trusted. According to BrightLocal’s 2026 survey, 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 41% “always” read them, up from 29% a year earlier.

AI assistants and review summaries pull from those same pages, so recent reviews that mention specific services (“they fixed our boiler the same day”) help you show up for those exact questions.

• Ask at the right moment: Right after a job is done or a product arrives, with a direct link to your Google review form.
• Keep them coming: A few new reviews every month beat 50 reviews from three years ago.
• Reply to every review: Thank happy customers and answer complaints calmly. Slow or copy-paste replies look bad to readers.
• Never buy reviews: Fake reviews can get your profile suspended, which removes you from Maps and AI answers at once.

Step 7: Track Your AI Visibility and Repeat Every Month

AI answers change often, so treat this like checking your bank balance: a quick look once a month.

• Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance (free): Launched in public preview in February 2026, it shows how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing AI summaries, and which phrases led to those citations.
• Google Search Console (free): AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic is counted inside the normal Performance report, so watch your clicks and queries there.
• A tracker for ChatGPT and Perplexity: Neither offers a free citation report like Bing’s, so use your Step 1 checklist by hand or one of the tracking tools above.

Each month, pick the one question where a competitor shows up and you do not. Look at what that AI cites, then fix the gap: a missing service page, a missing listing, or a list you are not on yet.

Myths You Can Ignore

• “You need an llms.txt file”: Google’s guidance says you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. It will not hurt, but it is not the fix.
• “Ads will get you into AI answers”: Ahrefs found only a weak link between branded ad spend and AI Overview mentions (0.215 correlation).
• “It is a totally new kind of SEO”: Google says the usual SEO basics still apply. Most of this list is good SEO and good local marketing.
• “AI replaced Google”: In BrightLocal’s July 2026 research, 23% of consumers used AI in their latest local search, but only 2% of people who started on AI used it as their only channel. Most checked Google too.

FAQs

Final Thoughts

Start today with the two free checks that take 15 minutes: ask ChatGPT about your business, and open your robots.txt file. If a bot is blocked or a listing is wrong, fix that first. Everything else builds on it.

Once AI starts sending people your way, make sure you catch them: these AI receptionists answer the calls you would miss, and these AI lead generation tools help you find even more customers.