How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

Eight steps, in the order that gets you the most for the least effort. None of it is secret, most of it is free, and you can do all of it yourself. Consistency is the hard part, not difficulty.

1. Let the crawlers in

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. If GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended appear next to Disallow, you are invisible on purpose, usually because a plugin or host decided that for you. Fix this first. Everything else is wasted until it is done.

2. Finish your Google Business Profile

The highest-payoff free hour available to a local contractor. Exact primary category. Every service listed individually. Service areas. Photos from this year. Answer the questions in the Q&A section yourself. Post occasionally so the profile looks alive.

3. Restart your reviews

Ask every customer the day the job finishes, with a direct link, by text. Not a week later, not by email. The day of.

Aim for a steady trickle rather than a burst. Twenty reviews arriving over five months is worth more than twenty in one week, and it looks like what it is: a business that keeps doing good work.

4. Make your site fast and specific

Open it on your phone on cell data and count. Over three seconds and you are losing people and losing crawls. Then read your homepage as a stranger: does it say what you do, which towns you cover, and roughly what things cost? Vague sites do not get quoted, because there is nothing in them worth quoting.

5. Add the facts underneath

This is the one technical step. Every page can carry labeled facts for software: business type, services, service area, rating, review count, phone. Nobody sees it, and it is the first thing software reads. Verify it with Google’s free Rich Results Test when it is in place.

6. Answer real customer questions on real pages

Write down the ten questions you get asked on every estimate. Each one becomes a page that answers it properly, with real numbers, real local rules, real timelines.

Answer in the first two sentences rather than warming up for three paragraphs. That opening is what gets extracted, both by search engines and by assistants.

7. Get mentioned somewhere that is not yours

Trade associations. Supplier certified-installer lists, which are free and constantly underused. Chamber of commerce. Local press when you do something worth reporting. Genuinely helpful answers in community forums where your customers already talk.

One honest warning: do not spam forums with links. It gets removed, it damages your name, and the assistants read the replies calling you out as readily as they read your post.

8. Make your details identical everywhere

Pick one exact business name, one address format, one phone format. Then fix every listing that disagrees. Tedious, and it removes the doubt that quietly keeps you out of answers.

What to expect

Technical fixes can register within weeks. Reviews and mentions compound over a season. You will not flip a switch and appear tomorrow, and anyone promising that is guessing.

The genuine advantage is that almost nobody in your trade is doing any of this yet. The work is not hard. It is just unglamorous, and that is exactly why the window is open.