How do I get recommended by ChatGPT?

Start by finding out what ChatGPT says now

Almost everyone skips this and starts publishing. It wastes months. Ask ChatGPT the unbranded questions your customers actually ask - "best plumber in Tulsa", "who should I use for commercial HVAC near me" - and record what it says. Never search your own brand name; that only proves it can read your website.

You are looking for three outcomes per question: it named you with a source, it named you without a source, or it named someone else. The third case is the only one worth working on, and the answer text usually tells you why.

Make your facts machine-readable

ChatGPT will not infer facts it has to guess at. The technical layer exists so it does not have to.

• •Add an llms.txt file at your domain root listing your most important factual pages
• •Publish JSON-LD schema for your Organization or LocalBusiness with exact name, phone, address, hours and services
• •Make those facts identical everywhere on your site - a footer contradicting a contact page is a confidence killer
• •Allow the AI crawlers in robots.txt, including GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User

Get corroborated somewhere other than your own site

A claim that appears only on your own website is a claim of one. Engines weight agreement across independent sources heavily, which is why a business with a thin site but a strong presence across directories, listings and press often outranks a business with a beautiful site and nothing else.

Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, Bing Places and Apple Business Connect. Make sure the industry directories in your category carry the same name, phone and service area. Where you have real coverage or real reviews, make them easy to find.

Publish answer-shaped pages

A page structured as a sales pitch is hard to quote. A page that opens with a direct, complete two-sentence answer to a specific question is trivially quotable, and that is what determines whether an engine lifts your wording.

Write one page per real buyer question. Lead with the answer, then support it. Mark up questions and answers with FAQPage schema so each pair can be extracted individually.

Re-measure, because you do not control the model

No one can force a ChatGPT output. What you can do is remove every reason it skips you and then verify. Engines with live retrieval reflect changes within days of a re-crawl; answers coming from training data move much more slowly.

Run the same unbranded questions again two to four weeks after publishing. If the answers changed, the fix landed. If they did not, the problem is upstream - usually corroboration, not your website.