There is no form to fill in and no listing to claim. When a customer asks ChatGPT who to call, it searches the web, reads what it finds about the businesses near them, and names the few it can describe with confidence.
More customers ask this way every year. In BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US consumers, use of ChatGPT and other AI tools for local recommendations rose from 6% to 45% in a year [1]. Being known is not the same as being named, though. When Insites ran 10,000 US local businesses through ChatGPT using the kind of questions customers ask, 40.88% were never recommended at all [2].
Fewer people click through, too. In Pew Research Center's browsing data, people who saw a Google AI summary clicked a regular search result in 8% of visits, against 15% when no summary appeared [3]. The answer itself is where the decision starts.
Here is what ChatGPT looks at, and what you can do about each part. If you are new to the idea, start with what GEO is and how it differs from SEO.
The 4 Signals ChatGPT Looks For
Google ranks pages. ChatGPT writes an answer, and it wants that answer to be right, so it leans on facts it can confirm in more than one place.
1. Trust (Consistency & Profiles)
Before ChatGPT recommends a business, it needs to be sure the business is real. If your name, address, phone number and services match across your website, your Google Business Profile and the directories in your trade, you are easy to confirm. If they disagree, you are easy to skip.
2. Authority (Mentions)
One mention in a local news story or a respected trade publication can count for more than dozens of low-quality directory links. When a site people trust mentions your business for a specific job, that is something an assistant can repeat.
3. Relevance (Clear Pages)
Say plainly what you do and where. Your website should name your services, the towns you serve and how to reach you, in plain text near the top of each page. Structured data (schema markup) can label those facts for machines.
You may hear that an llms.txt file is required. It is optional: Google says "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features" [6].
4. Reputation (Reviews & Consensus)
ChatGPT checks what you say about yourself against what customers say about you. In the Insites benchmark, the businesses that both ChatGPT and Perplexity recommended averaged 133.4 Google reviews, against 10.7 for businesses neither recommended [2]. That is one vendor's data and a correlation, not a rule, but the direction is clear. Ask happy customers for reviews that mention the job and the town.
Google Rankings Help, but They Don't Decide It
Seer Interactive found that brands ranking on page one of Google had a strong correlation (about 0.65) with being mentioned in AI answers [4]. A ranking does not settle it, though. An assistant will pass over a page that is vague, heavily promotional or hard to pull facts from.
The "First 30%" Rule for Content
Kevin Indig's Growth Memo analysis of 18,012 ChatGPT citations found that 44.2% of them came from the first 30% of a page [5]. Put the answer first.
Every core page on your site should open with a plain summary. If you are a plumber, the first paragraph of your homepage should say what you fix, which towns you cover and how to reach you. Do not bury the answer at the bottom of the page.
Start by Checking
You cannot fix what you have not checked. Ask ChatGPT the question a customer would ask, without your business name in it, and see who gets named. It is also worth reading why ChatGPT recommends your competitor instead of you.
Run the free AI visibility check. We ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini one question your customers ask and show you who they named. It doesn't include a fix list. If you want the check every month, the $49 plan asks the same 8 customer questions on all 4 assistants and emails you what changed.
References
[1] BrightLocal. "Local Consumer Review Survey 2026." February 2026. brightlocal.com
[2] Insites. "The AI visibility benchmark: how 10,000 local businesses actually perform in ChatGPT and Perplexity." July 2026. Insites sells AI visibility audits. insites.com
[3] Pew Research Center. "Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results." July 2025. pewresearch.org
[4] Seer Interactive. "STUDY: What Drives Brand Mentions in AI Answers?" seerinteractive.com
[5] Kevin Indig. Growth Memo. growth-memo.com
[6] Google Search Central. "AI features and your website." developers.google.com