How do I get my business recommended when someone asks ChatGPT?

Ask ChatGPT for a good dentist in Hanover and it will name two or three. Ask Google a question and, increasingly, you get a written answer above the results rather than a list of links.

Something decided which businesses to name. If it is not yours, that is worth understanding, because this is the first genuinely new way of being found in about fifteen years.

The trade has started calling this GEO — generative engine optimisation. It is a clumsy name for a simple idea: the same work as being findable on Google, aimed at systems that answer in sentences instead of listing links.

What these systems are actually doing

There are two different things happening and it helps to keep them apart.

Answering from what was read during training. The assistant absorbed an enormous amount of text from the web at some point in the past and can produce plausible-sounding answers from it. This is the part you have the least influence over and it is also the least reliable — it can be out of date, and it can be confidently wrong.

Searching the web and summarising what it finds. Most assistants now do this for anything local or current. They run a search, read the top handful of pages, and write an answer from them. This is the part that matters, and it is far more within reach than people assume.

That second mechanism is the reason the honest answer to “how do I get recommended by ChatGPT” is less exotic than it sounds: be one of the pages it finds and can read easily.

Which is why most of this is the same work

If you already do the ordinary things well, you are most of the way there. The overlap with plain search work is close to total:

• A Google Business Profile that is claimed, complete and current. Assistants lean on it heavily for anything local — hours, address, category, reviews.
• Consistent name, address and phone everywhere. Contradiction makes a summariser hedge or skip you.
• Reviews, in volume, recent, and responded to. They are read as evidence a business is real and functioning.
• Being mentioned on sites that are not yours — the local paper, the chamber, a supplier’s dealer list, an association directory. A machine writing a recommendation is looking for corroboration, and a business that only exists on its own website has none.

If you have not done those, do them. There is no separate track.

What is genuinely different

A few things matter more here than they do for ordinary search.

Answer questions in the words people ask them. These systems match on meaning rather than keywords, and they extract answers from prose. A page headed with a real question, followed by a direct answer in the first two sentences, is enormously easier to lift from than a paragraph of marketing that gets to the point in the fourth line. Write the answer first, then the context.

Say the specifics out loud. Assistants get asked constrained questions — open on Sundays, takes that insurance, sees children, does emergency call-outs, serves this township. If the answer is a fact about your business, put it on the page in plain words. Do not leave it to be inferred from a photograph or a PDF.

Structured data pays off twice. The small machine-readable block describing your hours, address and services is now doing double duty: it helps search engines, and it gives a summariser facts it does not have to guess at.

Plain HTML beats clever pages. If your hours only exist inside a slideshow, a graphic, or something that only appears after a script runs, a machine reading your page may simply not see them. Text on the page wins.

Being wrong somewhere is worse than being absent. If an old directory says you close at five and you now close at seven, an assistant may confidently tell somebody you are shut. Hunt down the stale entries.

What nobody can honestly promise you

I want to be straight about the limits, because this is a young field and there is a lot of confident nonsense in it.

There is no ranking to buy or check. Different assistants answer differently. The same assistant answers the same question differently on different days, and to different people. There is no position to report to you.

Nobody can guarantee you get named. If somebody offers to “get you into ChatGPT” for a monthly fee, they are selling a promise they cannot keep.

It changes underneath you. How these systems retrieve and cite is being rebuilt constantly. Anything anyone tells you about the mechanics — this piece included — is a description of 2026 and should be read with the date attached.

The measurement is bad. You cannot really see this working the way you can watch a search ranking. The most practical thing is to ask the assistants yourself, periodically, the questions your customers would ask, from a fresh session — and note what comes back.

What I would actually do

1. Finish the ordinary work. Profile, consistency, reviews, a site that can be read. This is most of it and it is not optional.
2. Write the questions down. The ten you answer on the phone every week. Each becomes a page or a section, headed with the question, answered immediately underneath.
3. Put the constrained facts in text. Hours, service area, what you take, who you see, what you do not do.
4. Add structured data so the facts are stated twice — once for people, once for machines.
5. Get mentioned somewhere that is not your own site.
6. Check it yourself every couple of months. Ask the assistants what you would ask. Write down what they say.

Notice that steps one through five are things worth doing even if every assistant vanished tomorrow. That is deliberate. I would not recommend spending on work whose only value depends on a technology this new continuing to behave the way it does today.

The short version

GEO — generative engine optimisation — is being the business an assistant names. The mechanism is mostly that it searches, reads a few pages, and summarises. So the work is: be findable, be readable, be corroborated elsewhere, and state your facts in plain sentences rather than leaving them to be inferred. Almost all of it is the same work that has always paid off, done a bit more explicitly.

If you want to know what a machine can currently read on your site, the free site check tells you in about twenty seconds. If you would rather just ask, tell me what your business does and I will tell you what I would change first.