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How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT: a guide for small businesses

When someone asks ChatGPT «which garage do you recommend in Villena?» or «a good dental clinic in Alicante?», the assistant answers with three, four or five names. It does not pick them at random: it takes them from what it finds about each business online. This guide explains what it looks at, how to find out whether it names you, and the seven steps that make it name you more often, in the order worth doing them. It applies equally to Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok and DeepSeek.

English translation of the Spanish guide, written for businesses in Spain. Published on 2 October 2026 by Salvador Nadal.

Summary in three lines. 1) Assistants recommend very few businesses, and they almost always take them from sources other than the business's own website: Google Maps, directories, reviews, local press. 2) Your website has to let them in and say, in text, what you do, where and when you are open. 3) Nobody can guarantee that an AI will recommend you, but you can measure whether it does and fix what you are missing.

First: check properly whether it already recommends you

Asking ChatGPT about your business once tells you nothing, for two reasons. First: if you put your name in the question, the assistant will look you up and find you, but your customers do not ask about you; they ask for «a florist in Valencia». Second: the same assistant does not give the same answer twice. When we measured ten answers to the same question about florists in Valencia, the most-named florist appeared in five. A single query is a roll of the dice.

How to do it properly: write three or four questions the way a customer would (without your name), ask several assistants, repeat each question several times and note who comes up. If you would rather not do it by hand, our free check asks for you and shows who the AI names today in your sector and area (try it here, in Spanish).

How ChatGPT decides who to recommend

When the question is about businesses in a particular area, today's assistants do not rely on memory alone: they search the web at that moment, read a handful of pages and summarise. That is why what matters is not «being in the AI», but being on the pages the AI reads when it searches for your sector and your town. What has been measured so far points in three directions:

With that in mind, the steps make sense. They are in order of impact for a local business; if you run an online shop or a service without premises, skip step 2 and give more weight to step 4.

Step 1. Let the AI into your website

If your website blocks the assistants' crawlers, they cannot read it or cite it. It happens more often than you would think, almost always without the owner knowing: a block list copied from somewhere, a security plugin, an «are you human?» wall. In our census of Spanish websites, one in twenty-five blocks at least one of the five main crawlers in its robots.txt (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended), and others simply do not respond to anything that is not a browser.

How to check: open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for lines such as User-agent: GPTBot (or OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot) followed by Disallow: /.

Step 2. Your Google Business Profile, complete and active

For a business with premises, or one that serves a local area, the Google Business Profile is the source that comes up most often: Gemini uses it directly and the other assistants read pages that copy it. What matters:

We have seen it measured: in a real local search, the business in third place on the map had 5 stars and 36 reviews, behind two competitors with more volume. The map is a race of consistency, not tricks.

Step 3. Sign up on Bing too

It is the step almost nobody takes, and one of the most worthwhile. ChatGPT and Copilot rely on Bing's index to search, so you want Bing to know you well:

Step 4. Appear where the AI reads about your sector

This is the step that weighs most, and the one that depends most on the sector. The question is not «which directories should I be in», but which pages the AI cites when asked about businesses like yours in your area. For a clinic it is usually Doctoralia; for home improvements, Habitissimo; for restaurants, Tripadvisor and local guides; for almost everyone, an article along the lines of «the best X in your town» in a newspaper or a local blog.

How to find out: ask Perplexity your customers' questions and look at the sources it shows under each answer. Note the ones that repeat. Then, for each: if it is a directory, sign up with the same details as on Google; if it is an article, write to whoever wrote it with something worth telling (not a request to be included); if it is a review site, ask your happy customers to leave a review there too.

Step 5. Make your website say in text what you do, where and when

An AI reads text. If your home page is a full-screen photo, a carousel and a WhatsApp button, for the AI it is empty. Check that, in ordinary text and without having to click anything, there is:

Step 6. Tell the machines too: structured data and llms.txt

Step 7. Measure every month and adjust

Models are updated, sources change and your competitors move. What gets you named today may not be enough in three months, and vice versa: one article in the local paper can change the answer from one month to the next. Without measuring, you do not know what worked. Repeat the check from the beginning once a month, with the same questions, and note the results.

If you would rather not do it by hand, that is what Nombradía is for: every week we ask the assistants what your customers ask, in your area, measure your position on Google, compare you with your competitors and give you the list of what you are missing, with the technical files already written. It costs from €29 per business per month, with no minimum term.

What does not work (and you will be offered it)

Frequently asked questions

Can I pay to have ChatGPT recommend my business?

No. There is no way to pay OpenAI, Google or Anthropic for their assistant's answer to recommend you. What you can do is work on the sources the assistant reads: your listing, your reviews, your sector's directories and your website.

How long does it take to see results?

It depends on the sector and the starting point. Changes to your website and Google listing usually take weeks to show in the answers, because search engines have to read you again. Appearing in a new source the AI already cites can show sooner. That is why it is worth measuring every month rather than after two days.

Do I need a website for the AI to recommend me?

It is not essential: some businesses appear thanks to their Google listing and reviews alone. But without a website you depend entirely on what others publish about you, and the AI has less to go on about exactly what you do. A simple website with clear text and your details helps.

Is this the same as SEO?

They are very similar, and almost everything that helps on Google helps with AI. Optimising to be cited by assistants is called GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) or AEO. The practical difference is that with AI, what others say about you (directories, reviews, press) weighs more, and your exact position in a list of results weighs less.