How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT and other AI assistants?
The short answer
Make your business legible to a machine that cannot see. Assistants assemble answers from pages they can read as text, corroborated across several sources. That means real text rather than images, facts stated plainly and consistently everywhere, structured data, and enough third-party mention that you are not the only place saying you exist. There is no submission form and nobody to pay.
On this page
How the answer actually gets made
Worth understanding, because it explains everything that follows and it is not what most people assume.
When somebody asks an assistant for a recommendation, it is not consulting a directory it was paid to include you in. It is assembling an answer from text it can read — pages it has ingested, plus in most cases a live search — and it favours facts that appear consistently in more than one place.
Three consequences fall straight out of that:
- If your content is not text, you do not exist. A menu as a photograph, prices inside a graphic, opening hours in an image. A machine reading your page sees nothing there.
- If a fact appears only on your own site, it carries less weight than one that also appears on your Google profile, a directory and a review.
- There is nothing to submit and nobody to pay. Anyone selling you "AI optimisation" as a listing service is selling you nothing.
The five things that decide it
1. Your pages have to be real text a machine can read.
This is the one that eliminates most small businesses before anything else matters. Menus, price lists, service descriptions and hours must be text on the page, not pictures of text — see should my menu be a PDF.
The subtler version: some sites only assemble their content after JavaScript runs. Google mostly copes with that; assistants mostly do not. A site built that way can be invisible to them however good it is.
2. Answer the question in the question's own words.
Assistants match questions to answers. A page headed "Services" answers nothing. A page headed "Do you deliver to [area]?" with the answer in the first line underneath is directly liftable — which is why a properly written FAQ is now one of the highest-leverage pages on a small site. See how do I write a good FAQ page.
3. Be consistent everywhere.
Your name, address, phone and hours must match, character for character, across your site, your Google Business Profile and any directory you are in. Inconsistency does not just look sloppy — it makes an assistant less confident it is describing one business, so it hedges or omits you.
4. Structured data.
The machine-readable markup that says "this is a restaurant, these are its hours, this is a menu with these dishes at these prices". It does not make you rank; it removes ambiguity about what your page is saying. See what is schema markup.
5. Be mentioned somewhere that is not your own site.
This is the one small businesses most often lack. Reviews, directory listings, a local news mention, a supplier page, an association membership. Corroboration is what turns "this business claims to exist" into "this business exists" — and reviews do more of that work than anything else you can influence. See how to get more Google reviews.
What does not work
- Paying for "AI optimisation" listings. There is no index to be listed in.
- Keyword stuffing. It was already dead for search; it is worse than useless here, because a model summarising an unnatural page produces an unnatural summary.
- Writing more content for the sake of volume. Assistants are not counting pages. Ten pages that answer real questions beat a hundred that circle a topic.
- A chatbot on your website. Genuinely unrelated to whether an external assistant recommends you, though people conflate the two constantly.
The uncomfortable truth about accuracy
Here is the risk nobody mentions. An assistant will happily read your website and tell somebody your opening hours — including if they are last winter's.
You cannot correct that conversation. There is no support line. The only lever you have is that the source it read is right, which makes stale content more expensive than it used to be. A wrong price on your site used to disappoint one visitor; now it can be repeated confidently to people who never visit your site at all.
That raises the value of maintenance above almost everything else on this page.
What this looks like in Helm
The five things above split into three groups, and only one of them is a platform's job.
The structural group is handled by construction. Helm sites ship as real HTML — the text is in the page before anything runs — with structured data in place and the sitemap generated and kept current. That covers points one and four, and it is the part most small business sites fail on without knowing.
The group that stays yours is the content and its accuracy, which is where this article's real warning sits. The prices, the hours, the answers to the questions people actually ask, the FAQ entries — those are fields you edit and press Go Live on, in both languages if you run in both. Which matters more here than in ordinary SEO, because being confidently misquoted is worse than being ignored, and the only defence is that the page an assistant read this morning was right.
The last group — reviews and mentions elsewhere — nobody can do for you, and it is free.
The short version
Make it text. Answer real questions in real words. Keep your name, address and hours identical everywhere. Add structured data. Get reviewed. Then keep it accurate, because the newest risk is not being missed — it is being quoted correctly from information that stopped being true in March.