How to get your small business recommended by ChatGPT and Google’s AI

The short answer: you get recommended by AI the same way you earn a good word-of-mouth reputation — by being clear, consistent and genuinely useful, everywhere a machine can read you. There’s no secret setting and no button to press. But there is a concrete checklist, and most small businesses have done almost none of it.

This is the same groundwork we lay for our own clients. If you’re new to why this matters, start with SEO, AEO and GEO explained. If you’re ready to act, work through the list below.

First, understand what an AI is doing

When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI “who’s a good conveyancer in Ballarat?”, the AI isn’t pulling from a secret directory. It’s drawing on what it has read across the public web and, in many cases, searching live — then summarising the businesses it can describe clearly and consistently.

So the job isn’t to trick the AI. It’s to make your business the easiest one to describe accurately. Everything below serves that one goal.

The checklist

1. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile

This is the highest-leverage single move for any local business, and it’s free.

• Register at Google Business Profile and complete every field — category, hours, service area, description, photos.
• Make your business name, address and phone number exactly match your website. Not “St” on one and “Street” on the other. Identical.
• Keep it current. Wrong hours are worse than no hours.

Google’s own local results and its AI answers both lean heavily on this. If you do nothing else this month, do this.

2. Make your website unmistakably clear about who you are

AI engines quote plain, factual statements. Your site should state, in plain words a machine can lift:

• What you do: “We’re a mobile mechanic servicing Melbourne’s inner north.”
• Who you serve: “…for private car owners and small fleets.”
• Where: your suburb, city and region, in text — not buried in an image.
• How to act: a clear next step (call, book, enquire).

Avoid clever taglines as your only description. “Driving your day forward” tells a machine nothing. “Mobile car servicing in Brunswick” tells it everything.

3. Answer real questions, in question form

This is the heart of AEO and GEO. Create pages and posts that:

• Use the actual question a customer would ask as a heading (“Do you service hybrids?”).
• Answer it in the first one or two sentences, before any preamble.
• Add a short FAQ section — these blocks get lifted almost verbatim into AI answers.

Think about the exact wording your customers use and write to it. One well-answered question can get you cited for years.

4. Be consistent everywhere (this is the one people skip)

AI engines trust a fact they see stated the same way in multiple places. So your name, address, phone and one-line description should be identical across:

• your website,
• your Google Business Profile,
• directories (in Australia: True Local, Yellow Pages, Hotfrog, your local chamber of commerce),
• your LinkedIn or other social profiles.

Inconsistent details don’t just look sloppy — they actively weaken the machine’s confidence that it’s the same business, which makes it less likely to recommend you.

5. Add structured data (or have someone add it)

Behind the scenes, schema markup is a snippet of code that spells out to a machine “this is a professional service, here’s its name, here’s what it offers, here’s where it operates.” It’s invisible to visitors and highly legible to engines. This is the one item on the list that’s genuinely technical — a web person can add it in an afternoon, and it’s worth doing.

6. Earn a few honest mentions

You don’t need to go viral. A handful of quality, consistent mentions — a directory listing, a local news mention, a genuine customer review, a LinkedIn presence — all reinforce the same signal: this business is real, and it’s described the same way wherever it appears.

What not to do

• Don’t keyword-stuff. Cramming “best café Sydney cheap coffee near me” reads as spam to modern engines and can hurt you.
• Don’t fake reviews. Beyond the ethics, engines and platforms are good at spotting them, and the penalty isn’t worth it.
• Don’t chase every new AI platform individually. You can’t manually optimise for each chatbot. The groundwork above improves all of them at once, because they draw on the same public web.

How long does it take?

Honestly: months, not days. Search engines and AI both need time to crawl your information, see it repeated consistently, build confidence and start citing you. The businesses that win are the ones that get the fundamentals right and keep them right — not the ones chasing a shortcut.

Frequently asked questions

Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT? No. Unlike ads, there’s no paid placement inside an AI’s organic recommendation. You earn it through clarity, consistency and reputation across the web — the checklist above.

Do I need to be on every AI platform? No, and you can’t optimise for each one separately anyway. ChatGPT, Google’s AI, Perplexity and the rest all draw on the same public web. Getting your fundamentals right improves your standing across all of them.

What is schema markup, in plain terms? It’s invisible code on your website that labels your information for machines — “this is the business name, this is a service, this is the area served.” Visitors never see it; search and AI engines read it to understand you accurately.

I’m not technical. What can I actually do myself? Plenty. Claim your Google Business Profile, make your details consistent everywhere, and write pages that answer your customers’ real questions in plain English. The only genuinely technical item — structured data — can be handled by a web person or an automation setup.

How is this different from normal SEO? It shares the same foundation but aims one step further: not just ranking in a list, but being clear enough to be chosen as the answer. See SEO, AEO and GEO explained for the full picture.

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If this list feels like one more thing on top of running your business — that’s exactly the kind of ongoing admin we take off owners’ plates. Our free 30-minute review will tell you where your business stands today and what’s worth fixing first. No jargon, no obligation. You can also browse our common questions.