The six steps we use in Perth to get a business named by ChatGPT and other AI assistants, and how to measure whether it is working.
To get your business recommended by ChatGPT, make it easy for ChatGPT to find you, read you and trust what it reads: answer the questions your customers ask on your own site in plain facts, get listed correctly on the directories and review sites it pulls answers from, and keep your Google reviews coming in. Nobody can guarantee a mention, but you can measure where you stand today by asking it the questions your customers ask, then re-asking the same questions every four weeks to see what changed.
Want ChatGPT to recommend you?
We build AI search into the SEO work for Perth businesses.
That is the method we run for every SEO client at Enkindle in Perth, and it is the same work behind our AI SEO service. Below is each step, what it involves and how long it tends to take.
When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation with web search on, it searches the web, reads a handful of pages and writes a summary. If your site is not one of the pages it reads, and the directories and lists it trusts do not mention you, you are not in the answer.
So most of getting recommended by ChatGPT is SEO done properly. The difference is the reader. A person skims your page and makes a judgement. An AI assistant lifts sentences and facts it can use without guessing, and it leans on what other sites say about you as much as what you say about yourself.
The same is true of Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. The method below works across all of them, which is why we track all of them rather than ChatGPT alone.
Start with a baseline, not a guess. This is the first thing we do for a client, and you can do a simple version yourself.
The third point matters most. The list of sources tells you where to put your effort. If every answer about your trade is built from the same two directories and one review site, that is your to-do list.
If you try this yourself, use a logged-out or fresh chat and keep the wording identical each time. Answers change from day to day and from person to person, so one screenshot proves very little. A set of questions asked the same way every month does.
Write pages that answer the question in the first two sentences. Put the question as the heading, the answer straight under it, then the detail.
Write the facts an assistant needs as plain statements: what you do, where you do it, which suburbs you cover, what it costs or where pricing starts, how long a job takes. "We service Joondalup to Mandurah" can be lifted into an answer. "We go above and beyond for every customer" cannot.
A few things that help:
The first baseline nearly always turns up questions where no competitor is named at all. Those are the quickest wins, because there is no one to displace.
They are usually specific: a service in a suburb, a price question, a "who does X for a small business" question. If ChatGPT names nobody when asked that question, a clear page that answers it gives the engine something to use.
Structured data is code on the page that labels what things are: your organisation, your local business details, your services, your products, your FAQs. It helps search engines and AI tools read your facts without guessing.
The rule is that the markup must match what is visible on the page. Markup that claims things the page does not say is ignored at best.
This is the step most businesses miss. When an assistant recommends a local business, it often builds the answer from directories, "best of" lists and review sites rather than from business websites.
Each baseline run shows which of those sources the answers were built from for your trade. The job is to get you listed correctly on the ones that matter, with the same name, address, phone number and service list everywhere.
Reviews and your Google Business Profile carry a lot of weight for local recommendations. A steady flow of genuine reviews helps both your map listing and the AI answers that draw on it. If your profile needs work, our guide to getting into the Google map pack in Perth covers it.
It is also worth setting up Bing Webmaster Tools and a Bing Places listing alongside Google. Microsoft Copilot is built on Bing, and not every assistant gets its search results from Google.
Check your site is not blocking AI crawlers by accident. It happens more often than you would think, through a robots.txt file copied from somewhere else, or a security or hosting setting that blocks unfamiliar bots.
The ones to look for by name include OAI-SearchBot (used for ChatGPT search), PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot. If they are blocked, those tools cannot read your pages directly, however good the pages are. A technical SEO check picks this up along with crawl and speed problems that hurt you in Google too.
New pages and corrected listings can be picked up within weeks, because these tools search the live web. Changes that depend on reviews or other sites writing about you take longer.
That is why we re-run the questions every four weeks rather than checking once. It shows which changes moved and which did not.
No, and nobody honestly can. The answers change from day to day and from person to person.
What you can do is measure where you stand, do the work that makes you easier to find and cite, and check the same questions four weeks later. Be wary of anyone promising a guaranteed spot in ChatGPT's answers.
Small numbers, honestly reported. AI search is still a small share of anyone's traffic.
These are visits, not mentions. Mention tracking for our clients started in October 2026 and we will publish it once there is a before and an after.
Yes. The AI tools build their answers from pages that rank and from sites that are trusted. A site that is hard to crawl or thin on facts loses in both places, so the two are one job, not two.
With us, AI SEO is part of every SEO retainer, not a separate service or a separate invoice. Our SEO starts from $1,000 including GST, billed every 4 weeks, and standalone retainers are rolling with no lock-in.
If you would like to see what the AI tools say about your business before deciding anything, start with a free SEO audit, or read how our AI SEO in Perth works.
Answer your customers' questions on your own site in the first two sentences of each page, write prices, suburbs and scope as plain facts, get listed correctly on the directories and review sites ChatGPT draws on, keep genuine Google reviews coming in, and make sure your site does not block AI crawlers.
No one can honestly guarantee a ChatGPT recommendation, because the answers change from day to day and from person to person. What you can do is measure where you stand with a fixed set of customer questions, improve your pages and listings, and re-ask the same questions every four weeks to see what changed.
New pages and corrected directory listings can be picked up within weeks, because ChatGPT search reads the live web. Changes that depend on new reviews or on other websites writing about your business take longer. Re-checking the same questions every four weeks shows which changes worked and which did not.
With web search on, ChatGPT searches the web, reads a handful of pages and summarises them. For local businesses those pages are often directories, "best of" lists and review sites as well as business websites, so being listed correctly on the sources it uses for your trade matters as much as your own site.
Mostly it is the same work: clear answer-first pages, plain facts, structured data, a crawlable site and a strong presence on trusted directories and review sites. The difference is that you measure it by asking AI tools your customers' questions and recording who gets named, not only by Google rankings.
