How to Get Recommended by ChatGPT

Go to /ai-check/ and enter your website. There is no email gate and no sign in required.

The check reads your home page, your robots.txt file and your llms.txt file if you have one. From what it reads, it writes six questions a local buyer would ask for your trade, in your town, the kind of question someone types right before they call a business.

It then asks all six questions on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with live web search turned on, and reports whether your business was named in each answer. It also checks whether robots.txt blocks AI crawlers, whether llms.txt exists, and how the assistant currently describes your services and hours.

We also publish this checklist on its own printable page at /ai-seo/ai-search-optimization-checklist/.

How to check it worked: open the result page. You should see six questions, three assistants, and a plain yes or no next to your business name for each one. The page can be shared, and an emailed copy is optional.

For every question where your business was not named, the report shows which competitor was named instead, and which directory or page the assistant cited to answer that question. It also shows how the assistant currently describes your business, so you can see if that description is even right.

Write the missed questions down, one line each: the question, the competitor named, the page cited. That list is your work order for the next two steps.

How to check it worked: read the list back to yourself as a buyer would. For each missed question you should be able to point to the exact competitor name and the exact site the assistant used as its source.

ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answer local questions with live web search and cite the pages they read. The pages that get cited are the ones that answer the exact question with the town named. So for every missed question from step two, write one page that answers that question directly.

• One page per missed question, not one page trying to cover all of them.
• The service and the town in the URL, the title and the H1.
• The literal answer in the first two sentences, not buried under company history.
• Plain facts: what you do, where you do it, how someone reaches you.

How to check it worked: read the page cold, as if you were the assistant. Does the first paragraph answer the exact question, with the town named? If you have to scroll to find the answer, move it up.

Add LocalBusiness or Service schema to your site with areaServed listing every town you work in. Put the same phone number, hours and services on your contact page as plain text too, not only inside the schema markup.

• Schema: LocalBusiness or Service, with areaServed naming every town you serve.
• robots.txt: robots.txt can block the crawlers of OpenAI (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot), Anthropic (ClaudeBot), Perplexity (PerplexityBot) and Google (Google-Extended). Blocking any of them removes your pages from what that assistant can read.
• llms.txt: some assistants and crawlers fetch a file named llms.txt when it exists. We wrote a separate guide to building one at /ai-seo/llms-txt-for-local-business/.

How to check it worked: open yoursite.com/robots.txt and yoursite.com/llms.txt in a browser and read every line. Open your page source and search for LocalBusiness to confirm the schema is there and the areaServed towns are the right ones.

That change is public and sourced: OpenAI licenses Yelp reviews, ratings and business details into ChatGPT answers since July 23, 2026 (Search Engine Land). Whatever your Yelp profile says, that can show up in a ChatGPT answer about your business, so it needs to match your site.

Go back to the list from step two. For every directory that got quoted instead of your site, open that listing and compare it to your site line by line: business name, address, phone, hours, and the services offered.

How to check it worked: put your website and your Yelp listing side by side on two tabs. Name, address, phone and hours should match exactly, not just closely.

No one can promise what an assistant will say, and answers change over time. The day 14 re-run is the proof we offer: the same six questions, asked again, compared to where you started.

You can run the free check yourself again on day 14 at /ai-check/. If you would rather have all five steps above done for you, written up, and re-checked on day 14, that is the AI visibility pilot, $397 once, as of September 2026: one page per missed question, schema and the contact page fixed, crawler access fixed, listings made consistent, then the same six questions asked again with a before and after in writing.

How to check it worked: compare the day 14 result page to the one you started with, question by question.

What does it mean to get recommended by ChatGPT?

It means that when someone asks ChatGPT a buying question for your trade and town, with live web search on, your business is one of the names in the answer. We check this with six such questions on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.

How long does this take to show a result?

We re-ask the same six questions on day 14 after the fixes are made. No one can promise what an assistant will say or when it changes. The day 14 re-run is the proof we offer, not a promise of a result.

Do I need to block AI crawlers to protect my content?

No. Blocking GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended in robots.txt removes your pages from what those assistants can read, which works against getting named.

Is llms.txt required?

It is not required for a site to exist, but some assistants and crawlers fetch it when it is there. We cover how to write one at /ai-seo/llms-txt-for-local-business/.

How is this different from a rank tracking dashboard?

Dashboards built for marketing teams track prompts and citations over time on a monthly subscription. Our free check is a live read of your six questions today, and the pilot is a one time, fixed price implementation, not a subscription. We compare the tools in more detail at /ai-seo/best-ai-visibility-tools-for-local-business/.

What does it mean to get recommended by ChatGPT?

It means that when someone asks ChatGPT a buying question for your trade and town, with live web search on, your business is one of the names in the answer. We check this with six such questions on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.

How long does this take to show a result?

We re-ask the same six questions on day 14 after the fixes are made. No one can promise what an assistant will say or when it changes. The day 14 re-run is the proof we offer, not a promise of a result.

Do I need to block AI crawlers to protect my content?

No. Blocking GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended in robots.txt removes your pages from what those assistants can read, which works against getting named.

Is llms.txt required?

It is not required for a site to exist, but some assistants and crawlers fetch it when it is there. We cover how to write one in our llms.txt guide.

How is this different from a rank tracking dashboard?

Dashboards built for marketing teams track prompts and citations over time on a monthly subscription. Our free check is a live read of your six questions today, and the pilot is a one time, fixed price implementation, not a subscription.

This guide is part of our AI SEO hub. The six question test at /ai-check/ takes a few minutes, reads your site, and reports the same information step two of this guide asks you to read: who was named, who was named instead, and which pages got quoted. No email gate, no sign in.

If you would rather have the pages written, the schema added, the crawlers fixed and the listings matched for you, with a day 14 re-run in writing, that pilot is described at /pricing/.

Run the free check