How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT as well as Google?
Be on the pages the AI engines read, say plainly what you do and where, and check by asking ChatGPT the way a buyer would, several times. The crawlable pages that rank in Google are the same pages ChatGPT reads before it recommends anyone, so the work overlaps far more than the two acronyms suggest.
Get onto the pages the AI engines read, say in plain text what you do and where you do it, and then check by asking ChatGPT the way a buyer would, several times over. ChatGPT with search reads the same pages Google indexes, so the SEO you already do is the foundation, and being recommended adds one more job: being describable in a sentence somebody else could repeat. Everything below is work you can do yourself, in an afternoon, with no tools beyond your own website and a ChatGPT account.
Why does ChatGPT recommend some businesses and not others?
Because it has read about them somewhere other than their own website. When a buyer asks for a recommendation, a web-grounded engine searches, reads what it finds, and builds its answer from the pages that describe the options. Those pages are rarely the businesses' own homepages alone. They are "best of" roundups for the trade and the city, the established directories, review pages, and the occasional local news story. A business that only its own site describes gives the engine one self-interested source, which is the weakest possible file on you. A business that turns up in the roundups, the directories and the reviews gives the engine independent evidence, and independent evidence is what a recommendation is built from.
That is why the boring directories matter again. Web-grounded answers lean on aggregators and industry bodies, so an absent or inconsistent listing means fewer descriptions of you for the engine to find. Reviews work the same way: they are text about you, in words you did not write, and detailed reviews that name the service and the area read as evidence rather than marketing. One local news mention beats another page on your own site, for the same reason. Engines prefer sources about you over sources by you.
Consistency holds all of this together. If your website says one name, your Google Business Profile says another and a directory says a third, the engine can treat them as different businesses and split your mentions between them. Pick one exact name and use it everywhere.
Is this different from SEO?
Less than the acronym suggests. Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is the work of getting quoted and recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and the rest. The engines read the same pages a search engine indexes, so crawlability, titles and a clear H1 still decide whether you are in the running at all. If a page cannot be fetched as plain text, or its title says nothing about what you do and where, no amount of AI-specific work will rescue it. Fix that first.
What changes is the second step. A search engine ranks your page and lets the buyer click it. An answer engine reads your page and describes you, in its own words, alongside the competitors it also read. To win that step a page has to be quotable: a plain sentence that answers who, what, where and how much, near the top, in the words a buyer would use rather than the words your industry uses. Engines match meaning rather than strings, so a page stuffed with the right phrase that never answers the question behind it gets nothing, and a page that answers it in its first fifty words gets lifted.
Being named is not the end of the buyer's journey either. Almost nine in ten people check before they act on an AI recommendation, which means they arrive at your site with the engine's description already in their head. The site has to hold up to it: the same prices, the same service area, the same name. That is ordinary SEO hygiene doing a second job.
The engine can only repeat what somebody has written down. Make sure the somebody is not only you.
How do I check whether ChatGPT recommends my business?
Ask it the question your buyer would ask, in five fresh chats, and write down every business named. Answers vary from run to run, so one screenshot proves nothing in either direction: a single mention is not a win and a single absence is not a verdict. The rate at which you appear across the runs is the real number, and the names that keep coming back are your competitive set as the engine sees it, whatever you think of them. Write the tally down and repeat it next month.
Which model you ask matters too.
In a lab test, one business was audited twice with identical questions, engines and sample counts, and only the model tier changed. The cheaper models named it in 24.7% of answers. The flagship models named it in 63.0%, and the confidence intervals did not overlap. A buyer typing into ChatGPT gets the flagship model, so a check run on a cheaper or older one understates your visibility and overstates the problem. Use the model your buyers use, and ask it the way they would, with the city in the question.
Do this today
- Ask ChatGPT your buyer's question five times. Fresh chats, exact wording, city included, and a tally of every business named. Five runs show the pattern that one run cannot.
- Fix crawlability and titles first. View the source of your main service page and check the text is there, then put your niche and city in the title and H1 in plain words.
- Rewrite the opening of that page. Answer who, what, where and how much in the first 50 words, in the words a customer would say aloud. That is the passage an engine can lift.
- Get described by somebody other than you. Check your listing on the two directories that matter in your trade, ask the two best-of lists for your niche and city to consider you, and ask your last three happy customers for a review that names the service and the area.
Doing the check by hand for one question is an afternoon. Cyted asks the engines your buyers' questions for you and counts who they name.