Will ChatGPT recommend your business?

People have started asking chat assistants the questions they used to type into Google. Who is a good interior designer in Dubai? Which accounting software suits a small company in the UAE? The answer comes back as a short paragraph naming three or four businesses, and most people stop reading there. There is no page two.

So it is fair to ask whether your business is one of the names, and what decides that.

How an assistant finds its answer

An assistant has two places to look.

The first is its training: everything the model read before it was released. That knowledge is months or years old, and you cannot edit it.

The second is live search. When a question needs current information, the assistant searches the web, reads a handful of pages and writes an answer from them, usually with links to its sources. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews all work this way for local and commercial questions.

Live search is where you have influence, and it rests on ordinary search engines. Gemini and AI Overviews draw on Google’s index. Copilot draws on Bing’s. ChatGPT and Perplexity run their own crawlers alongside search partners.

The first conclusion is an unexciting one. Being found by AI starts with plain SEO. A site that Google and Bing cannot read will not be quoted by anything built on top of them.

Step one: let them in

Check that you are not turning the crawlers away without knowing it.

Your site has a file called robots.txt that tells crawlers what they may read. The AI crawlers have their own names: OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot for OpenAI, ClaudeBot for Anthropic, PerplexityBot for Perplexity. Some hosting and security services also have a switch that blocks AI bots, and it can be on without you having chosen it. Cloudflare has one. I checked it when I launched this site.

Blocking can be a sensible decision. Some publishers allow the crawlers that power search answers and refuse the ones that collect training data. What you want to avoid is blocking all of them by accident.

While you are there, register the site with Bing Webmaster Tools. Many businesses set up Google Search Console and never think about Bing, which feeds Copilot and is one of the sources ChatGPT has drawn on.

Step two: be quotable

Assistants build answers out of passages lifted from pages. A passage gets lifted when it answers a question completely in two or three sentences and contains something specific.

Compare two openings for the same business.

We are a passionate, results-driven team delivering innovative solutions for our valued clients.

Harbour Dental is a family dental clinic in Jumeirah 1. We offer check-ups, braces and implants, and open from 9 am to 9 pm every day except Friday.

The first gives an assistant nothing to repeat. The second answers who, what, where and when in two sentences. (The clinic is invented for the example.)

In practice:

• Say plainly who you are, what you do and where, near the top of the page.
• Answer the questions customers really ask, in question-and-answer form.
• Give specifics wherever you honestly can: areas served, prices or price ranges, timings, what is included.
• Keep facts in text. An assistant cannot quote a price that only appears inside an image.

Step three: label the facts

Structured data is a small block of code that states your facts in a format machines read without guessing: the business name, the address, opening hours, services, and questions with their answers. It guarantees nothing. It removes doubt about what your page says, and doubt is what keeps a business out of an answer.

You may also hear about llms.txt, a plain-text summary of a site written for AI tools. It is a proposal. Google has said its AI features do not need it, and the studies published so far have found little or no measurable effect on being cited. It takes ten minutes to add, and this site has one. I would not expect much from it yet.

Step four: be mentioned somewhere else

An assistant is cautious about recommending a business that exists only on its own website. It looks for agreement between sources.

That means the same name, address and description of what you do, repeated consistently across your Google Business Profile, the directories for your industry, review sites and LinkedIn. For “best in Dubai” questions, the pages being quoted are often lists and review sites, so being present and well reviewed there matters more than another round of polish on your home page.

How to see where you stand

Ask. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and type the questions your customers would type. Note which businesses are named and, more usefully, which sources are cited. Those sources are where you need to be present.

Do it again next month. Answers change from one run to the next, so look for patterns over time and ignore any single result.

What does not work

Repeating keywords until a page reads like a list. Publishing fifty machine-written articles in a week. Hidden text addressed to chatbots. Anyone selling guaranteed placement in ChatGPT, because nobody controls those answers.

What works is slower and duller. A site the crawlers can read, pages that answer real questions with real specifics, and a business that other sources describe the same way you do.

If you want that set up properly, it is part of how I approach SEO.