How to Get ChatGPT to Recommend Your Business

Something has quietly changed about the way people find businesses online. A growing number of Australians are no longer typing into Google and scrolling through pages of links. Instead, they're opening ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or one of dozens of other AI assistants, asking a direct question and expecting a direct, trustworthy answer.

They're asking things like:

• "Who builds Wix Studio websites on the Mornington Peninsula?"

• "Who's the best mortgage broker in Melbourne?"

• "Can you recommend a local disability equipment provider?"

The AI answers. It names businesses. And if yours isn't one of them, you've lost that customer before they even knew you existed! This is the new reality of digital search and it's moving faster than most business owners realise.

How does AI search actually work?

Before we get into what to do, it helps to understand how AI search works, because AI search is genuinely different from what you're used to with Google. Google operates on a search index where websites submit themselves, Google crawls them, ranks them based on hundreds of signals, and serves results. There's a clear system, and traditional SEO is the practice of playing that system well.

AI assistants don't work that way. There's no index to submit to, no ranking algorithm to reverse-engineer, no single lever to pull. When a tool like ChatGPT responds to a local business query, it draws from a combination of sources: information it absorbed during training, live web search results, trusted directories and review platforms, structured business data, industry citations, and signals of online authority and credibility.

What that means in practice is that your visibility in AI search is not determined by one thing. It's the cumulative result of how your entire online presence reads: your website, your listings, your reviews, your content, your reputation. If that picture is clear, consistent and credible, AI is more likely to trust you and mention you. If it's patchy, outdated, or vague, you likely won't register in AI search results like those in ChatGPT.

Your website needs to be clear about what you do.

AI cannot recommend a business that it cannot understand. And a surprising number of websites make it very to understand exactly what you do and the problems your business solves. They lead with vague taglines, beautiful imagery, and not much else. They assume visitors already know roughly what the business does and just need a nudge.

AI responds to clarity. Every page of your website should be able to answer straightforward questions on what you do and exactly what your business solutions are without any ambiguity: What does this business do? Who do they help? Where do they operate? What specific services do they offer? What makes them a credible choice?

If a reader had to guess at the answers to any of those questions, your website isn't clear enough. And if your website isn't clear enough for a person, it certainly isn't clear enough for an AI that's trying to make a confident recommendation.

This doesn't mean your writing has to be dry or corporate. It means the information has to be there, stated plainly, without making anyone work to find it. Good writing can be both readable and precise.

Helpful content is the most powerful thing you can publish

If there is one practice that cuts across traditional SEO, AI search and genuine customer value all at once, it's publishing content that actually helps people. AI search tools like ChatGPT are trying to answer questions. They look for businesses that demonstrate real knowledge and genuine expertise in their field. The way you demonstrate that is by creating content that addresses the real questions your customers have, written clearly, in your own voice, with actual useful information.

This doesn't mean churning out keyword-stuffed articles. It means writing a guide that walks a client through what to expect when they engage a business like yours. It means publishing a FAQ that addresses the questions you get asked every week. It means writing a case study that shows how you solved a real problem for a real client. It means explaining how your industry works in plain language, so someone who knows nothing can start to understand it.

The test is simple: would your customers find this genuinely useful? Would they read it and come away knowing something they didn't before, or feeling more confident about a decision they need to make? Content that genuinely helps people gets referenced, shared and cited. Those citations build your authority. That authority is exactly what AI systems are looking for when they decide who to recommend.

Traditional SEO still matters for AI search

There's a narrative circulating that AI search has made SEO obsolete. It hasn't. If anything, strong SEO is now more important, because many of the signals that help you rank well in Google are the same signals that help AI assess your credibility.

A fast-loading, mobile-friendly website signals technical competence. Clear page structure and descriptive headings make your content easier to parse. Well-written title tags and meta descriptions give AI (and Google) a concise summary of what each page is about. Quality backlinks from reputable sources indicate that other credible entities trust you enough to reference you. Internal linking shows that your site is organised and your content is connected.

Getting your SEO foundations right now pays dividends in both traditional search and AI recommendations. Getting them wrong creates gaps that are increasingly hard to compensate for.

Consistency across all touchpoints for maximising AI search visibility

This is one of those things that sounds almost too simple to matter, and yet it causes real problems for businesses that overlook it.

AI systems draw your business information from multiple sources simultaneously. Your website, your Google Business Profile, your Facebook page, local directories, industry listings, review platforms. If your business name, address and phone number differ between those sources, even slightly, it creates ambiguity. And AI doesn't like ambiguity. When it can't be confident which version of your information is correct, it loses confidence in recommending you at all.

The fix is straightforward: audit every place your business appears online and make sure the details are exactly consistent. Same business name, same address format, same phone number, same service descriptions. This is sometimes called NAP consistency (Name, Address, Phone) and it's a foundational element of local SEO that carries directly into AI search.

While you're at it, make sure your Google Business Profile is complete and up to date. It remains one of the most heavily weighted sources for local business information across both Google and AI systems that draw on Google's data.

Your reputation online is something AI actively looks for

When a person asks an AI to recommend a business, the AI is effectively being asked to vouch for someone. It won't do that lightly. It looks for evidence that others have found your business credible and trustworthy. That evidence comes in a few key forms.

Customer reviews are the most direct signal. A business with a strong, recent body of reviews on Google, Facebook, and industry-specific platforms is a business that AI can recommend with some confidence. Not because the volume of reviews is impressive, but because those reviews represent genuine human endorsement.

Beyond reviews, AI looks at citations: mentions of your business on reputable websites. Being featured in a local publication, referenced by an industry body, listed in a relevant directory, or linked to from a credible source all contribute to your authority in the eyes of AI systems. These are the same signals that have always mattered for SEO, now carrying even more weight.

If you've been putting off asking satisfied clients for reviews, or haven't thought about how your business appears in industry directories and local media, now is the time to start.

Structure your website so AI can find what it needs

A well-structured website doesn't just help visitors navigate. It helps AI understand the full scope of what your business offers.

Many businesses make the mistake of cramming everything onto a single homepage or a few general pages. This is understandable from a design perspective, but it limits how much an AI system can extract. If your services are buried in a wall of text, if there's no dedicated page for each thing you do, if your location coverage isn't spelled out clearly somewhere, AI simply won't know.

Dedicated pages for each service you offer, the industries you work with, the locations you service, your frequently asked questions, your team, and your contact information give AI a much richer picture of your business. They also give you more opportunities to rank in traditional search, and more pages that can be individually referenced and cited.

Think of your website not as a brochure, but as a body of evidence. The more clearly organised and comprehensive that evidence is, the stronger your case for being recommended.

Keep your website current to show up in AI search

An outdated website is a liability in AI search for the same reason it's a liability with customers: it signals inactivity. If your blog hasn't been updated in two years, if your team page still features people who left the business, if your services list is out of date, AI picks up on that. It's a sign that the information may not be reliable, and AI systems err on the side of caution when they're uncertain.

Regular updates to your website don't need to be dramatic. Publishing a new article every few weeks, keeping your services current, refreshing your testimonials and portfolio, updating your team information as it changes. These small habits compound over time into a picture of an active, credible business that's worth recommending.

What is AI Search Optimisation and do you need to worry about it?

You may have started hearing the term AISO, short for AI Search Optimisation. It's a genuine emerging discipline, and it's worth understanding, though it's less revolutionary than some of the coverage suggests.

AISO is, at its core, about making your business easier for AI systems to understand, trust, and recommend. When you break that down into practical actions, you'll find that most of them are things good digital strategy has always called for: a clear, well-structured website, authoritative content, consistent business information, a strong review profile, and credible links from other reputable sources.

What AISO adds to the conversation is a shift in mindset. It asks you to stop thinking exclusively about how Google reads your website, and start thinking about how an AI assistant would respond if someone asked about your business. Would it find enough clear, credible information to confidently recommend you? Or would it hedge, or skip you entirely?

The businesses that answer that question well are the ones that will have a real advantage as AI search continues to grow.

"How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business?"

What works is a combination of things that reinforce each other: a professionally built website that explains your business clearly, strong SEO foundations, genuinely helpful content, consistent business information across the internet, a solid review profile and real credibility signals from reputable external sources.

The businesses that show up most consistently in AI recommendations are not the ones who found a loophole. They're the ones who built a genuinely strong online presence and kept it current. That has always been good digital strategy. It's now essential.

If you're building a new website or rethinking your existing one, you have an opportunity that many of your competitors haven't acted on yet: to build a site that's designed from the ground up for the way people actually search these days.

Peninsula Design Co builds websites for businesses on the Mornington Peninsula and beyond that are designed to be found, trusted and chosen. If you'd like to talk about what your online presence could look like, we'd love to hear from you.