How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and other AI engines

Six principles

• Measure first. Ask the engines the questions your customers ask, many times, and see who they name. You cannot fix what you have not counted.
• Be readable. Your content must be in the HTML your server sends, because AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. Do not block OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or the live fetchers.
• Answer the real questions. Customers ask specific things: who is open Sunday, who services a particular model, who takes walk-ins. A page that answers the exact question is easier for an engine to use.
• Be consistent. Name, address, phone, hours and services should match across your site and every profile that describes you.
• Be where the engines read. Each engine leans on different reviews, directories and local sources, and the mix differs by market.
• Measure again. Answers vary, so judge changes on the same questions and the same engines, month over month.

For car dealerships

Buyers ask AI which dealer to visit for a model, a service, or a price question, from the towns around the store. The dealers that win are the ones whose pages and listings answer those questions for those towns. Dealer group websites often bury the answers, or render them with scripts AI crawlers cannot read.

For clinics, hotels and other local businesses

The same principles hold. Patients ask which practice takes their insurance or sees children. Travellers ask which hotel is closest to a venue or has parking. The business whose pages answer the exact question is the one that can be named.

What does not work

• Hidden text or instructions aimed at AI. Engines detect it, and it can breach consumer protection law.
• Fake or incentivised reviews, which the FTC now treats as a violation in their own right.
• Thousands of near-identical city pages. Search engines treat them as spam, and AI engines rely on those search results.