How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

01 · What's changed

Many buyers now ask an assistant instead of searching

They ask an assistant for a recommendation and act on the answer. That answer is assembled from sources the model can read, parse and trust — which means the question is no longer only where you rank, but whether you are quotable.

Case study: how Auckland got named first by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity

02 · First

Put the answer in plain text on the page

An assistant can only quote what is in the HTML. A price that only appears after a click, a FAQ that expands with JavaScript, an answer buried in a PDF — none of it can be cited. Put the direct answer in a short paragraph immediately under a heading that matches the question, and let the detail follow underneath.

03 · Second

Your details must match across other websites

Models weight corroboration. A business that appears consistently across its own site, a maps listing, a directory and a client's page is easier to trust than one that only asserts things about itself. Consistency of name, location and service description across those sources matters more than the volume of them.

04 · Third

Add schema markup that matches the visible page

Schema markup tells a parser what a paragraph means rather than leaving it to infer. It has to mirror what a human actually sees on the page — marking up claims that don't appear in the visible content is the one shortcut here that gets you penalised rather than ignored.

AI search optimisation in Qatar

05 · The one people miss

Make sure Bing has indexed your site

Several assistant products search through Bing's index. Businesses that have optimised exclusively for Google are routinely invisible to them, and it's usually a submission problem rather than a quality one — a fifteen-minute fix that nobody has done.