· 3 min read · Jason Youngjin Koh
Getting recommended by ChatGPT
More customers now ask an AI for a recommendation before they search. The businesses it names are the ones it can read, identify and find corroborated elsewhere.
AI assistants recommend businesses they can read, identify with confidence and find described consistently by other sources. To be named when someone asks for the best tennis coach, dental clinic or skincare brand near them, a business needs pages that answer that exact question in plain text, accurate listings and profiles, genuine reviews, and mentions on sites the engines already trust.
How does ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?
For local and current questions, assistants such as ChatGPT search, Gemini and Perplexity search the web, read a set of pages and summarise them. They favour sources that answer the question directly, agree with each other and look authoritative: business directories, review platforms, local news, industry sites and the business's own pages. A business that appears consistently across those sources is easier to recommend.
What can a local business control?
| Signal | What to do |
|---|---|
| Your own website | A page for each service and area, with the answer in the first paragraph and the text readable without JavaScript |
| Business identity | The same name, address, phone and one line description everywhere |
| Google Business Profile | Complete categories, services, hours, photos and regular updates |
| Reviews | Steady, genuine reviews that mention the service and the suburb |
| Third party mentions | Directories, local press, partner and client sites, industry associations |
Why do some businesses never appear?
- Their website shows a blank page to crawlers that do not run JavaScript.
- Their name is shared with other businesses and the engine cannot tell them apart.
- Nothing outside their own site mentions them.
- Their pages describe the business vaguely instead of answering what a customer asks.
We found the first two problems on our own site. AI crawlers saw only a homepage shell, and three other companies share the name ScaleMaster. Fixing both, by pre-rendering pages and stating our address, ABN and founder in structured data, is what made our own pages readable and identifiable.
What kind of page gets cited?
One that answers a specific question clearly and early. A page titled tennis lessons for adult beginners in your suburb, which opens with who the lessons are for, when they run and how to start, is far more quotable than a homepage listing everything. Write one page per question customers actually ask.
How do you check whether AI recommends you?
Ask. Put the questions your customers would ask into ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, from the location they would ask from, and record who gets named. Repeat monthly. The answers change as sources change, and the gaps show which signals are missing.
The technical half of this problem, and how to test your own site in a minute. Why AI cannot see your website