How do I get my business to show up when people ask ChatGPT for a recommendation?
Short answer
For most local businesses, this is the same work as showing up in Google search, not a separate service. Allow the AI assistants' crawlers in your robots.txt, keep your site and Google Business Profile accurate, and check what the assistants actually say about you. There's no way to submit your business directly.
Reviewed
Where does ChatGPT get its business recommendations from?
Mostly from the same open web that classic search reads: your website, your reviews, and what other sites say about you. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT’s search features, and that a site blocked from that crawler won’t be shown in ChatGPT’s search answers. If your site isn’t crawlable, an AI assistant has nothing to read.
Can I submit my business to ChatGPT?
No. There’s no submission form, no paid placement and no directory to list yourself in. What you can do is let the crawlers in and make sure what they find (your site, your Google Business Profile, your reviews) describes your business correctly.
Is GEO different from SEO?
Not in the way it’s often sold. GEO (generative engine optimization) means making sure AI assistants find and describe you accurately, and for most local businesses that’s close to identical to plain search visibility work: a site that ranks, is crawlable, and says clearly what you do and where. We don’t sell GEO as a separate service layered on top of a site that doesn’t already rank in search, because a business invisible to search is invisible to an AI assistant reading the same web.
Does this also cover Google’s AI Overviews?
Yes, and Google says so directly. Google’s page on AI features says you don’t need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema markup to appear in them; the ordinary basics carry over, from crawlable pages to an up-to-date Business Profile. That covers llms.txt, a file some sites publish for AI tools. We publish one because it costs nothing and describes what we run. We don’t expect it to get anyone cited.
How can I check what AI assistants say about my business?
Ask them yourself. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity and ask for the best business in your category and area, the way a customer might. Forward Dawn’s one-time Business Audit does the same thing systematically across all four and reports exactly where, if anywhere, you appear, so you’re working from what the assistants actually say rather than a guess.
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