What do I do to get ChatGPT to recommend my business?
The question we get most often. One sentence of answer, then seven steps you can work through in two afternoons.
We write about one thing: why ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name some local businesses and never mention others, and what to do about it. No theory you would have to verify afterwards anyway.
The question we get most often. One sentence of answer, then seven steps you can work through in two afternoons.
A customer asks an assistant for a good pizza place nearby and gets three names. Not ten links, three names. This post explains where they come from and why yours is not among them.
Twelve years of trading, a website and a hundred reviews, and the assistant behaves as if you did not exist. That is not random, and there is usually one specific cause.
Almost every local business now has a Google profile. The trouble is that most stop at name, address and phone, and that is not enough for a model to have anything to say.
Most people run this test wrong and conclude that everything is fine. Three conditions decide whether the result means anything at all.
Four point eight stars mean nothing to a model. The sentence "best sourdough around, always fresh" means everything, because that sentence can be quoted in an answer.
A Google-generated answer sits above the results and is often enough that the user clicks nothing at all. For a local business that changes what is at stake.
Structured data is a note for machines, hidden in your page source. No customer will ever see it, and a crawler gets your name, address, hours and trade from it without guessing.
Everyone who remembers how Google Ads works asks this. The answer is short, and for most businesses it is good news.
One line in a text file can shut your site to every assistant at once. Checking takes thirty seconds, and without it none of the other work matters.
The answer depends on what you sell. For a publisher, blocking can make sense. For a bakery it is an own goal. The good news is that the two decisions can be separated.
We ask ChatGPT three of your customers’ questions and show you the full answers with timestamps. You get the result straight away, no card.
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