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How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Claude

Miranda
How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Claude

More and more people skip Google and just ask. “Who’s a good web designer near Chattanooga?” “What’s the best bakery in Cleveland, TN?” “Recommend a wedding photographer in North Georgia.” They type it into ChatGPT or Claude, and they get a short list of names.

If your business isn’t on that list, you’re invisible to a growing slice of your customers, and you’ll never even know they were looking.

I covered the big picture in What Is GEO? This post is the practical follow-up: how to get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI assistants, step by step, with prompts you can use to check your progress.

How AI assistants decide who to recommend

There’s no secret submission form. When someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, it generally draws on two things: what it learned during training, and, more and more often, a live web search it runs to answer the question. Either way, it’s working from what it can find and understand about your business online.

That means the businesses that get recommended tend to have a few things in common:

None of this is magic, and nobody can guarantee a recommendation. But every item on that list is something you control.

Step 1: Find out where you stand

Before you change anything, ask. Open ChatGPT, Claude, and any other assistant your customers might use, turn on web search if it’s an option, and try prompts like these:

Who are the best [your service] providers in [your city or region]?

I'm looking for a [your service] for [a specific customer need]. Who would you recommend in [area]?

What do you know about [your business name] in [city]?

Write down who shows up, what the assistant says about you (if anything), and where it seems to be getting its information. The last prompt is especially telling. If it gets your services wrong or confuses you with another business, that’s your first fix.

Step 2: Make your website impossible to misunderstand

AI assistants are good readers, but they can only repeat what you’ve actually written. Vague homepage copy like “We help you grow” gives them nothing to work with.

Your homepage and service pages should state, in plain words:

If you’re not sure your homepage covers this, my guide to what to put on your homepage walks through every section.

A quick Claude prompt to check yourself:

Here's the text from my homepage: [paste]. Pretend you're an AI assistant deciding whether to recommend this business. Based only on this text, summarize what the business does, who it serves, and where. Then tell me what's unclear or missing that would make you hesitate to recommend it.

Step 3: Add schema markup

Schema markup is structured data added to your site’s code that labels your information in a way machines can read: this is the business name, this is the address, these are the services, these are the reviews. It’s one of the most direct ways to remove guesswork.

For most small businesses, start with LocalBusiness (or a more specific type like ProfessionalService) on your homepage, Service schema on service pages, and FAQPage schema where you have question-and-answer content. On WordPress, plugins like Rank Math can handle much of this without touching code.

I run a [type of business] in [location]. Write LocalBusiness JSON-LD schema for my homepage using these details: [name, URL, address or service area, phone, hours, services, social profiles]. Use the most specific schema type that fits, and point out any fields I should fill in that I haven't given you.

Always test the result with Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator before you publish it.

Step 4: Get your business details consistent everywhere

AI assistants cross-check. If your website says one thing, your Google Business Profile says another, and an old directory listing has your previous phone number, you look less trustworthy.

Claim and complete your Google Business Profile and Bing Places listing, then check the directories that matter in your industry (Yelp, Facebook, the Better Business Bureau, local chamber of commerce, industry-specific directories). Make your business name, service area, phone, and description match everywhere. Bing deserves special attention, since Bing’s index has historically fed into some AI search tools, and it’s a step most small businesses skip.

Step 5: Earn mentions beyond your own website

Your website is what you say about yourself. Reviews, local news coverage, guest posts, podcast interviews, “best of” roundups, and partner pages are what other people say about you, and AI assistants weigh that heavily.

A few realistic places to start:

Step 6: Write content that answers real questions

AI assistants are built to answer questions. Content written as clear answers to the questions your customers actually ask is easy for them to understand and reuse.

Use question-style headings (“How much does a small business website cost in Tennessee?”), answer directly in the first sentence or two, then add detail. An FAQ section on each service page is a great place to start.

I'm a [type of business] serving [audience] in [area]. List the 20 questions my potential customers are most likely to ask an AI assistant before hiring someone like me. Group them by stage: just researching, comparing options, ready to hire. Mark which ones would make the best blog posts and which would work as FAQ answers on my service pages.

Step 7: Make sure you’re not blocking AI crawlers

This one surprises people. Some websites block AI crawlers without the owner ever knowing, through a robots.txt rule, a security plugin, or a hosting or CDN setting. Some services now block AI bots by default.

Check your robots.txt file (yoursite.com/robots.txt) and your security and CDN settings. AI companies publish the names of their crawlers, such as OpenAI’s GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot and Anthropic’s ClaudeBot. There are reasonable arguments both for and against letting AI companies use your content for training, but if your goal is to be found and recommended, make sure you’re not blocking the crawlers that power AI search and answers.

Step 8: Check again in a couple of months

These changes take time to show up. Search engines need to recrawl your site, directories need to update, and new reviews need to accumulate. Rerun your Step 1 prompts every couple of months and compare. You’re looking for your business to appear more often, and for the description to be more accurate.

Your AI visibility checklist

Want help getting found?

This is a big part of how I build websites for small businesses: clear copy, proper schema, and a site structure that both Google and AI assistants can understand. If you’d rather not do it all yourself, get in touch and let’s talk about your website.

And if you want to use Claude for the rest of your marketing, here are the Claude prompts I use to run my business.

More on Claude and AI for your business

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