How to get ChatGPT and Google's AI to recommend your business

By Jason Sibley

What this is for, and who it's for

Someone types "good plumber near me" or "which café in Galway does a proper brunch?" into ChatGPT, Google or Perplexity. A few names come back. You'd quite like yours to be one of them.

This guide is for owners of small local businesses: trades, cafés, salons, shops, consultants. No technical know-how needed. You need an afternoon, your phone, and ten minutes a month after that.

I'll be straight with you early. Nobody can make an AI assistant recommend you, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. What you can do is make your business easy to find and easy to trust. Most of it is housekeeping you'd want done anyway.

How AI assistants find local businesses

These tools don't hold a secret list of businesses. They look things up, rather like you would, then summarise. So what are they looking at?

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on ordinary Google Search. Google's guidance says the usual good practice still applies, and that there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overv