How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Other AI Assistants

How do AI assistants decide which businesses to recommend?

When someone asks an assistant "who builds Shopify stores for small businesses?", the assistant draws on content it has been able to read and, for many questions, on live search results. It tends to favour sources that are easy to access, clearly structured, consistent across the web, and confirmed by independent sites. How exactly it chooses differs between assistants and changes often, so no one can promise a particular result.

What you control is how easy you are to find, understand and verify. The seven steps below follow that order, from the most basic question, whether an assistant can reach your site at all, to the most advanced, whether other sites back you up. Work through them in order: a later step cannot rescue a site that fails an earlier one. For the background on the discipline itself, read what GEO is.

Step 1: Can AI crawlers reach your website?

AI companies use their own crawlers, each identified by a name in your robots.txt file. If robots.txt, a firewall or a bot-protection setting blocks them, those assistants may not be able to read your site at all, however good it is.

Step 2: Is your content in the HTML?

Many crawlers do not run JavaScript. If your services or contact details only appear after scripts load, a crawler may see an almost empty page. Server-rendered or prerendered pages put the important text in the HTML that crawlers download. This website is prerendered for exactly this reason.

A quick test: view the page source, or turn JavaScript off in your browser, and check that your main text and links are still there.

Step 3: Do you describe your business with structured data?

Structured data (schema.org markup in JSON-LD) states facts in a machine-readable form: your business name, what you offer, how to contact you and where you work. Organization, Service, Article and BreadcrumbList are useful types for most business websites.

Structured data also helps tell you apart from companies with a similar name. The BM Express case study describes a shipping company whose site gives its Arabic and English names in its markup and states which website is its official one, because other companies use similar names. Keep it accurate: markup that contradicts the visible page does more harm than none.

Step 4: Do your pages answer real questions directly?

• Start each page or section with a short, direct answer, then add the detail.
• Use the questions customers actually ask as headings.
• Write clear, factual statements an assistant can quote without misrepresenting you.
• Avoid vague marketing claims and invented statistics; an assistant cannot verify them and readers do not trust them.
• Show who wrote the page and when it was last updated.
• Add a real frequently asked questions section. The Candy Pirates storefront, for example, answers how the shop prices, how its chest works, where its stores are and how fast it ships.

Step 5: Are your business details consistent everywhere?

Assistants cross-check. Make sure your business name, services, contact details and description match across your website, Google Business Profile, social profiles, directories and marketplaces. Conflicting details make an assistant less confident about recommending you, and they confuse people too.

Keep a single written description of your business and the same facts about it, such as legal name, address, phone, email and opening hours, and reuse them exactly.

Step 6: Do other sites mention you?

Assistants tend to trust businesses that independent sources talk about: genuine customer reviews, case studies, industry directories, partner sites and press coverage. Earn these honestly and keep them factual. Fake reviews break platform rules and can damage trust permanently.

Good places to start are the directories and review sites that serve your industry, the pages of your suppliers and partners that can link to you, and case studies that name real clients with their permission.

Step 7: Does a search index know about your pages?

Several AI tools rely on the index of a search engine such as Bing or Google, so a page that has not been indexed cannot be found through them. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, keep the sitemap's dates accurate, and consider IndexNow, a protocol that tells participating search engines when a page has been added or changed.

You may also hear about llms.txt, a plain-text file that summarises your business for AI systems. It is cheap to add, but Google says its search does not use such files and no major AI provider has confirmed that it reads them, so treat it as optional and put your effort into steps 1 to 6 first.

What does the whole checklist look like in one table?

How do I check whether AI assistants mention my business?

Ask several assistants the questions your customers would ask, such as "who builds Shopify stores for small businesses?", and note whether and how your business appears. Answers vary between assistants, between sessions and over time, so check regularly, in different wording, rather than relying on one result.

If an assistant says something wrong about you, look first for the cause: out-of-date or conflicting information on your site or in directory listings is the usual source.

Can anyone guarantee that an AI assistant will recommend my business?

No. AI assistants decide their own answers and change how they work without notice. These steps remove the most common reasons a business is left out and make you easier to understand and trust, which improves your chances. A company that guarantees a specific mention is overpromising. Our guide on SEO versus GEO explains how the work relates to ordinary search optimization.

How can Novatrix Digital help?

We build these foundations into every website and Shopify store we make, and we can audit an existing site and fix what is holding it back. You work directly with the engineers who do the work, and every project is quoted individually.

Read about our SEO and GEO services, or request a free quote and tell us what you would like AI assistants to understand about your business.