How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Perplexity

Something has shifted in how people find service providers. A client told me recently that before they booked a web designer, they asked ChatGPT "who are the best SEO consultants in London?" and shortlisted whoever came up. They did not open Google. They did not scroll through maps. They just read what the AI said and started making calls.

That conversation is now happening thousands of times a day across every industry and every city. The question I get from business owners is: how do I make sure the AI recommends me instead of someone else?

I want to give you a straight answer, not a hyped-up one.

The New Buyer Journey

The old journey looked like: search Google, scan ten blue links, open a few tabs, compare. The new journey for a growing number of buyers looks like: ask an AI assistant a conversational question, read the answer, visit one or two of the sources it cites, then contact someone.

This is not replacing Google entirely, but it is compressing the awareness and consideration stages. If your business does not appear in that AI-generated answer, you do not exist for that buyer. They will never get to your website.

"ChatGPT SEO" is now a real search term people type into Google. Business owners have noticed that competitors are showing up in AI answers and want to understand why.

How ChatGPT and Perplexity Actually Decide Who to Recommend

These tools are not magic. They work in two ways: they have been trained on a large corpus of web content and developed a sense of which businesses and people are authoritative in which areas; and many of them (including Perplexity, ChatGPT with search enabled, and Google's AI Overviews) retrieve live web content at the moment of the query and synthesise what they find.

What that means practically: AI assistants favour entities that appear consistently across credible sources. Your website, your Google Business Profile, directory listings, review platforms, news mentions, and social profiles are all signals. If those signals are coherent, consistent, and credible, the AI builds a clearer picture of what your business is, where it operates, and who it serves. If those signals are thin, contradictory, or absent, you are a blur.

Five Things That Make AI More Likely to Recommend You

1. Consistent entity signals across the web

Your business name, address, phone number, and service descriptions should match everywhere they appear. Not approximately match — exactly match. AI systems and the search engines they pull from are sensitive to inconsistencies. If your Google Business Profile says one thing and your website says another, that creates uncertainty about who you are.

2. Named individuals with verifiable credentials

Businesses represented by real people with findable professional histories rank higher in AI trust signals. This means having an About page that names the people involved, links to their LinkedIn profiles, mentions their background, and ideally cites any third-party coverage they have received. Anonymous businesses are harder for AI to verify.

3. Genuine reviews on platforms AI retrieves from

Google reviews, Trustpilot, industry-specific directories — these are sources that AI tools retrieve from and weight heavily when generating local or service-specific recommendations. Volume matters less than recency and specificity. A review that describes what the reviewer hired you for, what the outcome was, and where they are based gives AI more signal to work with than "great service, highly recommend."

4. Clear, specific service pages that answer the questions buyers actually ask

AI answers are often assembled from pages that directly address a question. If someone asks "who does SEO for e-commerce businesses in Manchester," a page on your site titled "E-commerce SEO Manchester" that explains what you do, who it is for, and what results look like is far more useful to an AI than a generic services page. Write for the question, not the keyword.

5. Schema markup that communicates what you are in machine-readable form

LocalBusiness schema, Service schema, Person schema, Review schema — these tell AI crawlers exactly what your business is, what it does, and where it operates. Schema is not a magic ranking factor, but it removes ambiguity. Ambiguity is what keeps you out of AI answers.

What Does Not Work

Stuffing your pages with phrases like "recommended by AI" or "as seen on ChatGPT" does nothing. AI models are not trained to reward self-reference of that kind.

Buying fake reviews is particularly risky in an AI-retrieval world. These systems cross-reference multiple sources, and patterns consistent with fake reviews — sudden spikes, thin reviewer profiles, generic language — reduce rather than increase trust.

Claiming credentials you do not have is worse. AI tools pull from sources that include regulatory bodies, professional associations, and news archives. Unverifiable claims create friction that makes AI less likely to surface you, not more.

How Long Does This Take

I want to be honest here. Building the kind of entity authority that influences AI recommendations is not an overnight process. Some businesses see movement in two to three months if their foundations are weak and they fix them comprehensively. For most, it is a six-to-twelve month horizon.

What is within your control: the quality and consistency of your entity signals, the depth of your service pages, the authenticity of your reviews, and the presence of named individuals with real credentials. What is not within your control: exactly which queries trigger a mention of your business, or how frequently any given AI model retrieves your content.

You are building trust signals. Trust is gradual.

Where to Start

The first thing I recommend is an honest audit of your entity signals: does your business appear consistently across the web, and does what it says about you actually represent what you do?

Start with the AI Visibility Checklist — it walks through the core signals in order of impact and gives you a practical list to work through.

If you want a more tailored assessment of where you stand and what would move the needle for your specific business and market, get in touch.