How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT?

The honest answer has four steps, none of them exotic, and one uncomfortable caveat: nobody can promise you a place in an answer, including us.

The short answer

You cannot submit your business to an assistant, and nobody can sell you a place in its answers. What you can do is change what it finds when it goes looking, which is the only mechanism there is.

When somebody asks for a business like yours in your town, the assistant runs a search, reads what comes back, and writes a paragraph naming two or three businesses. Everything you can influence happens in the material it reads. Get that material right and you become one of the plausible names. Leave it wrong or absent and you are not in the running, however good you are at the actual job.

Four steps, in this order, because the order changes how much each one is worth.

What does not work, so you can stop being sold it

There is no submission form. No directory of businesses that assistants consult, no verification badge, no application. Anyone offering to add you is selling you something else under that description.

Nobody sells placement. Not us, not an agency, not the person who emailed you this morning. The providers do not offer it, and if they ever do it will be labelled as advertising the way search ads are.

Prompting it yourself does nothing. Asking an assistant about your business, telling it what you do, correcting it in a chat — none of it persists to anybody else’s conversation. You are editing a transcript, not a record.

Writing more blog posts, on its own, does nothing much. Volume is not the constraint. Specific, checkable facts are.

Step one: find out what it says about you now

Before changing anything, ask the questions your customers ask, and write down the answers.

Ask for the best in your trade in your town. Ask who to call. Ask what the job costs. Do not name your business — naming it hands the assistant the answer and manufactures a mention that tells you nothing.

Note two things each time: whether you were named, and which sources were cited. The sources are the important half. They are the material the answer was built from, and they are the thing you can actually go and change.

Ask each question more than once, because the same question produces different answers between runs. One absence might be one unlucky draw. Absence across several runs and several questions is a finding.

Step two: make your sources agree

This is the step that does the most work and the one people skip because it is dull.

Assistants describe you using directory records, review platforms, community threads and your own site. Where those sources agree, the description is confident. Where they disagree, the assistant reconciles them — and the result is a hedged, blurry summary that names somebody else more clearly than it names you.

So claim the listings that actually get cited, and make them identical rather than merely similar. Same business name, same address format, same phone number, same service words, same towns. The full mechanics are in the sources that keep coming back, and the single most common wrong fact — opening hours — has its own page.

Step three: give it something worth quoting

Once the sources agree, the question becomes what there is to say about you beyond your address.

An assistant writing an answer needs sentences it can stand behind. Most local sites do not contain any: a photograph, a headline about quality, a contact form, and nothing stating what the work costs, which towns you cover or what specifically you do.

Three things close that, and they are the most actionable work in this whole discipline. A page per service rather than one page listing everything. Prices, or at least a range, on a page where somebody would look for them. The towns you cover, written out as names.

Do those and your own site starts turning up as a source rather than a footnote, which is the half of this most owners never think about.

Step four: make sure it can read you

Last, because it only matters once there is something worth reading, and quick, because it is a file and a block of markup.

Check that your robots.txt is not blocking the crawlers that build the search index behind the assistant — plenty of sites block them by accident, and the distinction that matters is not the one most articles make. Publish structured data so your facts are machine-readable rather than inferred from a footer; the whole block is written out in the schema walkthrough. Add an llms.txt while you are there.

None of this earns you a mention on its own. All of it stops you being disqualified from one.

How long it takes to show up

Longer than you would like, and unevenly.

Records propagate on their own schedule. Search indexes update when they update. An assistant may read a corrected listing within days or may keep answering from a cached one for weeks. Nothing you do produces an immediate visible change, which makes this work easy to abandon two weeks in.

Judge it in months, and judge it on rates rather than single answers. Being named in a third of runs and then two thirds is real progress, and it is invisible to anybody checking once a fortnight and screenshotting the result.

What happens if paid placement arrives

It may. Search took years to grow an advertising layer and there is no reason to assume assistants will not, eventually.

If it does, it will look like advertising: labelled, sold by the provider, and separate from the organic answer. That is the pattern every previous surface settled on, and it is the one regulators expect.

The work above does not become worthless if that happens. It is the same work that decides the unpaid half, and businesses that treated search advertising as a substitute for being findable found out what that costs the moment they paused spending. Anybody selling you placement today, before such a product exists, is selling you something else.

The two-week trap

Almost everybody does the work, checks after a fortnight, sees no change, and concludes it does not work.

Nothing here produces a visible result in a fortnight. Directory corrections propagate on their own schedule. Search indexes update when they update. An assistant may keep answering from something cached for weeks after the underlying page changed.

Worse, the check itself is unreliable: ask once, get one draw from a distribution, and read far too much into it. If you are going to check, ask the same question several times across a couple of engines, and compare that against what you wrote down at the start rather than against your memory of it.

A realistic first month

Week one, measure. Ask your customers’ questions, record who is named and what is cited, and keep that list — it is the only baseline you will get.

Week two, agreement. Claim the records that actually appeared in those citations and make them identical. This is the dullest week and the one that decides the most.

Week three, substance. Write the pricing page and the service pages, and list the towns. This is where the research questions get won, and it is the only part nobody else can do for you.

Week four, plumbing and patience. Check the crawlers, publish the markup, and then leave it alone. Re-measure at the end of the following month, not the following week.

What nobody can promise you

That you will be named. Not us, not anybody.

The engines are not obliged to mention any business, they change how they answer without notice, and the same question genuinely returns different answers. Anyone guaranteeing placement is either misunderstanding the product or hoping you will not check.

What can be promised is narrower and still worth having: that you will know what the engines currently say about you, which sources they are using, what is wrong, and which fixes are worth the most for the time they take. What that measurement cannot tell you is written down too, because the limits are the part that decides whether the rest is believable.

Does this only work for one assistant?

No, and that is the most useful thing in this article.

The assistants are not reading separate worlds. They lean on the same directories, the same review platforms, the same threads, and the same websites. A business described consistently across those turns up wherever it is asked about; a business described three different ways tends not to.

So there is no separate campaign per assistant, and anybody offering you one is selling the same job several times. Do the work once. The question of which assistant actually sends local traffic turns out to matter far less than it sounds, because the work that wins one wins the rest.

What to do about a competitor who is always named

Look at them properly rather than assuming they know something you do not.

In almost every case the answer is unremarkable. Their listings agree with each other. Their site states prices and names towns. They have a page about the specific job rather than a page called Services. Somebody wrote about them in a local thread two years ago. None of that is a secret technique and all of it is available to you.

What it is not, usually, is a bigger marketing budget. This is one of the few areas where a small business with correct records and three honest pages outperforms a larger competitor with a beautiful site that states nothing.

Where to start tomorrow

Ask three questions your customers would ask, in your town, without naming yourself. Write down who got named and what got cited.

That takes fifteen minutes and it will tell you which of the four steps above is actually your problem. Most owners guess wrong about which one it is — they rebuild a website when the real issue was a directory record, or chase reviews when their site states no prices. Measure first, then work in order.

If you want the concept behind all of this rather than the instructions, start here.