Guide
How ChatGPT finds and recommends your business
More and more people don't just Google anymore. They ask ChatGPT: "Which physical therapist near me has Saturday appointments?" Here is where the answer comes from, and what you can do so your business is in it.
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A short list instead of ten links
Search Google and you get a page of results to click through. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or the AI Overview at the top of Google, and you get an answer with two or three names. For a local business, that means you're either on that short list, or the customer goes to someone else.
The questions are also getting more specific. People don't just ask for "plumber Tulsa" but for "a plumber in Tulsa who does tankless water heaters and can come this week." The businesses whose websites answer questions like that have the edge.
Where the AI gets its answers
When asked about local businesses, ChatGPT and Perplexity search the web while they answer, and Google's AI Overviews draw on Google's index. They mostly read:
- Your own website: services, address, hours, prices, common questions.
- Your Google Business Profile and its reviews.
- Directories and review sites that list you, such as Yelp, the BBB or your trade association.
- Articles and mentions, for example in local news.
Nobody can guarantee a recommendation, and neither can we: which names an AI gives is its own call. But you can make its job easy. What is written clearly and says the same everywhere is more likely to be understood, and more likely to be named.
Seven things you can check yourself
Your key facts are on the page as text
Services, address, phone number and hours belong on your website as plain text, not only inside an image, a PDF or a slider. What only appears in an image, an AI often can't read.
The same facts everywhere
Your name, address, phone number and hours should match exactly on your website, your Google Business Profile and in directories. Conflicting details make your information look unreliable, and unreliable details get repeated less.
A page for each main service
A page called "Drain cleaning" that says what you do, for which problems and how fast you can come answers a question directly. A list of twenty keywords doesn't.
Structured data in the page code
Structured data following schema.org tells machines who you are: type of business, address, hours, services, common questions. Many website builders and plugins support it, but it often has to be switched on and filled in.
Don't block AI crawlers
Your robots.txt file says which programs may read your site. Some security settings block the crawlers of AI search, such as OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT) or PerplexityBot. If they're blocked, you can hardly show up in those answers.
Fast and easy to read
Content that only loads through JavaScript isn't seen by every crawler. A fast, lean site helps both your visitors on their phones and the programs reading your site.
Reviews and mentions
Ask happy customers for a Google review, and get your business listed with your trade association and in the directories that fit. AI answers like to lean on several sources that agree.
One extra that takes little effort: an llms.txt file. It sums up your business's key facts in plain text for AI systems. It's a young proposal, not a settled standard, and each system decides whether to read it. It does no harm.
Check your website in a minute
Our free website check measures how fast your site loads on a phone, whether it has structured data about your business, whether there's an llms.txt, and whether visitors can call or contact you from the first screen.
Then ask ChatGPT yourself, the way your customers do: "Which vet in [your town] would you recommend?" and "What do you know about [your business]?" Are the address and hours right? Is anything missing that matters to you? That shows quickly where the gaps are.
What Closelift builds into every website
Every website we build comes with the points above from day one, with nothing for you to set up:
- Your services as their own pages, in text that people and machines can read.
- Structured data about your business, address, hours, services and common questions.
- An llms.txt with your key facts.
- A robots.txt that explicitly allows the crawlers of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google and Apple.
- While building, we check your address, phone number and hours against Google Maps and flag any mismatch before the site goes live.
- Fast pages whose content is in the HTML, without needing JavaScript.
Want to see what that looks like for your business? We'll build you a free preview from your current website. What it costs after that is on our pricing page.