How to Make ChatGPT Recommend Your Business

Two hundred million people use ChatGPT every day. Not every month — every day. Perplexity handles over 100 million queries a month. Google's AI Overviews now appear in 15% of all searches.

When someone asks one of these tools "what's the best accountant for my small business" or "who can help me automate my workflows," the AI gives an answer. It recommends specific businesses by name.

The question is whether yours is one of them.

For most businesses, the answer is no. Not because your services aren't good enough. Because the AI doesn't know you exist.

That's fixable. And the businesses that fix it now will have a compounding advantage over every competitor that waits.

How AI Decides What to Recommend

Google ranks websites based on links, content quality, and hundreds of other signals. You probably already know that.

What you might not know is that ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini use a completely different process — and understanding it changes what you should be doing with your online presence.

Here's how it works. Large language models are trained on massive amounts of internet text. When that training happens, pages that are heavily linked, frequently cited, and widely discussed get more weight. They show up more often in the training data. The model learns that these sources are authoritative.

Then, when someone asks a question, the model reaches for what it learned. If your business appeared frequently in high-quality contexts during training — cited in articles, mentioned on resource pages, referenced in industry roundups — the model is more likely to recommend you.

But there's a second layer. Modern AI tools don't just rely on their training data. They also search the web in real time. ChatGPT uses Bing. Perplexity crawls the web directly. Gemini pulls from Google's entire ecosystem. So your current online presence matters too — not just what existed when the model was trained.

The result is a two-part system:

1. Training data determines your baseline visibility — are you in the model's memory at all?
2. Real-time search determines your current visibility — can the AI find and verify you right now?

If you're strong in both, the AI recommends you confidently. If you're weak in one or both, you're invisible.

What Each Platform Cares About

Not all AI tools evaluate your business the same way.

ChatGPT uses Bing for its web searches, which means Bing optimization matters more than you'd think. If you've ignored Bing because "everyone uses Google," you're now invisible to 200 million daily ChatGPT users. Reviews, video content, and your Bing Places listing all carry extra weight. ChatGPT also personalizes its answers, so businesses with strong, consistent brand signals across multiple platforms get recommended more often.

Perplexity calls itself an "answer engine," and it acts like one. It prioritizes trustworthiness and source authority above everything else. It updates its index daily, which means freshness matters — a blog post from last week ranks higher than one from last year. Backlinks from educational institutions (.edu) and media outlets carry outsized weight. And Perplexity hates fluff. If your content gives direct, useful answers, it gets cited. If it's vague marketing copy, it gets skipped.

Gemini is deeply integrated with Google's ecosystem. YouTube content, Google Maps listings, Google Business Profile reviews, and even YouTube comments all factor in. If you've been ignoring your Google Business Profile or haven't posted a video to YouTube, you're missing signals that Gemini uses to evaluate your authority.

Claude does less real-time web searching than the others, but it excels at reasoning and analysis tasks. If someone asks Claude to evaluate options or compare service providers, it draws heavily on its training data. Businesses with in-depth, analytical content — case studies, methodology breakdowns, comparison guides — have an advantage here.

The Single Biggest Shift: Niche Beats Broad

Here's where LLM SEO diverges most sharply from traditional SEO.

On Google, ranking for broad terms like "AI consultancy" is the holy grail. More search volume means more traffic.

LLMs work differently. They categorize businesses by use case. When someone asks "who's the best AI consultancy for non-technical small businesses," the model isn't sorting through a ranked list of all AI consultancies. It's looking for the one that most specifically matches that description.

This means niche positioning is no longer just a branding strategy. It's a discoverability strategy. A business that clearly positions itself as "AI automation for pool companies and home service businesses" will get recommended for that exact query, while a generic "full-service AI consultancy" gets passed over.

The businesses that own specific positions — "best for creative agencies," "specializes in dental practices," "focused on e-commerce under 50 employees" — are the ones LLMs cite. Because LLMs don't recommend based on who's biggest. They recommend based on who's most relevant.

What to Actually Do About This

Here are the concrete steps, in order of impact.

1. Add Schema Markup to Your Website

Schema markup is structured data that tells AI systems what your business is, who runs it, and how it connects to the rest of the internet. Specifically, you want JSON-LD markup for:

• Organization — your business name, description, logo, social profiles
• Author — who writes your content, their credentials, their other profiles
• sameAs — links to your social media, directory listings, and other official presences

This isn't visible to people visiting your website. It's metadata that AI systems read to understand your business as an entity. Without it, the AI has to guess who you are based on scattered signals. With it, you're giving the AI a clear, structured answer.

Most website platforms (WordPress, Squarespace, Next.js) support schema markup. It takes an afternoon to implement.

2. Create Decision-Making Content

LLMs get asked decision questions all the time. "Should I build custom software or use off-the-shelf?" "Is AI automation worth it for a small business?" "How do I choose between hiring a developer and hiring a consultant?"

If you've published a thorough, honest answer to one of these questions, the LLM is likely to reference it. Comparisons, case studies, pricing guides, and implementation breakdowns all perform well. The key word is honest — LLMs are trained to prefer balanced, nuanced content over promotional material.

3. Own Your Niche Position

Pick the most specific description of who you serve and what you do, and make it prominent everywhere. Your homepage, your about page, your meta descriptions, your social media bios.

"AI consultancy for non-technical small businesses" is citable. "We help businesses leverage AI" is not.

This doesn't mean you can only serve one type of customer. It means you lead with your strongest, most specific positioning. When an LLM needs to recommend a business for a specific use case, you want to be the obvious match.

4. Get Listed Where It Matters

Traditional link-building tactics like mass outreach and generic directories are dead for LLM purposes. What works now:

• Expert roundups where you contribute genuine expertise (not a quote farm)
• Resource pages on niche-relevant websites (your industry association, local business directories, tools you use that have partner pages)
• Guest contributions that demonstrate real knowledge, on sites your audience actually reads
• Original research that other sites naturally cite (surveys, data analyses, industry reports)

The goal isn't link volume. It's being mentioned in high-quality, topically relevant contexts. One citation in a respected industry publication is worth more than fifty links from random blogs.

5. Set Up Your Bing Presence

This is the most overlooked step. ChatGPT's 200 million daily users are searching through Bing, and most businesses have never touched their Bing presence.

• Claim your Bing Places listing (the equivalent of Google Business Profile)
• Submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools
• Make sure your business information is consistent across Bing's ecosystem

This takes 30 minutes and immediately makes you visible to every ChatGPT web search.

6. Monitor Whether It's Working

Ask the AI tools directly. Type into ChatGPT: "What are the best [your service] for [your target customer]?" Do the same in Perplexity and Gemini. If you don't show up, you know the gap. If you do, you know what's working.

This isn't sophisticated. But it's the equivalent of Googling yourself in 2005 — and the businesses that did that early are the ones that understood SEO before their competitors.

What Doesn't Work Anymore

Some traditional SEO tactics actively hurt you in the LLM era:

• Mass outreach templates — LLMs can detect low-quality, manufactured link patterns
• Generic guest posts on irrelevant sites — topical relevance now matters more than domain authority alone
• Link farms and directories — these signals are noise, not authority
• Vague, promotional content — LLMs skip marketing copy and look for substance
• Ignoring platforms besides Google — every AI tool has different sources, and they're not all Google

The new rule is simple: if a real human expert in your field would consider it valuable, LLMs will too. If it's manufactured for search engines, LLMs will ignore it or penalize it.

The Compounding Effect

Here's why this matters now and not next year.

Traditional SEO and LLM visibility are not separate strategies. They compound. A quality backlink from a respected industry site does three things simultaneously:

1. It improves your Google search ranking
2. It increases the probability you'll appear in AI training data
3. It gives real-time AI search tools a signal that you're authoritative

Every blog post you publish, every resource page you get listed on, every expert roundup you participate in — it all feeds both systems at once. The businesses that start building these signals now will be exponentially harder to catch in six months.

The math is straightforward. There are 200 million people asking ChatGPT questions every day. That number is growing. When they ask about your industry, your service, your type of business — will the AI know your name?

That's no longer a future problem. It's a today problem. And the fix starts with making sure the AI can find you, understand what you do, and verify that you're worth recommending.