How to get your business found by ChatGPT and other AI search
A guide from Social Web. Updated 19 October 2026.
People now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers things like "who cleans end of lease in Parramatta?" So it's fair to ask how your business gets into those answers.
Nobody can promise that an AI will recommend you. OpenAI says so itself: there's no way to guarantee top placement in ChatGPT search. Anyone selling you a guaranteed spot in ChatGPT is selling something they don't control.
What you can control is whether your business is easy to find and hard to get wrong. It's the same work that helps you on Google and on maps, and most of it costs nothing but time.
Where AI search gets its information
Each tool works a little differently, but they all lean on what's already published about you: your website, search engines and listings.
When ChatGPT searches the web, it sends queries to search providers, and OpenAI names Bing as one of them. Put simply, ChatGPT's search draws on Bing. OpenAI also runs its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and says your site has to let it in to be included.
Google says there's no special trick for its AI Overviews. A page has to be in Google's index and able to show in normal results, and the usual basics apply, including keeping your Business Profile up to date.
Perplexity runs its own crawler too, called PerplexityBot, which finds websites and links to them in its answers.
That means the work is the ordinary kind, done properly. There are five steps.
1. Say it plainly on your website
Your website should state, in plain text:
- what you do, service by service
- the suburbs or area you cover
- your opening hours
- your prices, or at least "from" prices
- your business name and phone number, exactly as you use them everywhere else
Put it in words on the page, not only inside a photo, a PDF or a flyer image. If a person has to squint to find your hours, a search engine may miss them too. A page for each main service helps, because each one can answer one question well.
2. Claim your three free listings
Three free listings cover the main maps and search engines:
- Google Business Profile, for Google Maps and Google search. Our step-by-step guide.
- Bing Places, for Bing and Bing Maps. Don't skip this one, because ChatGPT's search draws on Bing. Our Bing Places guide.
- Apple Business, for Apple Maps on every iPhone. It used to be called Apple Business Connect. Our Apple Maps guide.
All three are on one page in our free listings guide. Each takes about 15 to 30 minutes, plus a verification step that can take a few days.
3. Keep your details identical everywhere
Your business name, phone number and hours should match, word for word, on your website and on every listing. Two phone numbers, or Sunday hours on one and not the other, give a search engine two answers about you. Then it has to guess.
When something changes, change it everywhere on the same day: website, Google, Bing and Apple.
4. Make sure search engines can actually see your site
Some websites block search crawlers without the owner knowing, through a setting at the host or in a file called robots.txt. OpenAI and Perplexity both ask site owners to let their search crawlers in. Ask whoever runs your website to check that OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot aren't blocked.
Then check that Google has your pages at all. Google sometimes leaves pages out of its results, and its own documentation says indexing isn't guaranteed. Google Search Console, which is free, shows which of your pages are in and which are left out. Bing has its own free version, Bing Webmaster Tools.
5. Only real reviews
If you ask for reviews, ask real customers. Don't write them yourself or ask friends to post them. Platforms remove fake reviews, and it can cost you the listing.
What to be wary of
Be careful with anyone who promises ChatGPT will recommend you, or who says your site needs special code for AI. Google says its AI answers need no special structured data. The basics above are what it asks for.
We don't promise rankings. Nobody honest can.
Rather we did it?
On Website, looked after (A$199 a month) and above, we set up your Google Business Profile, Bing Places and Apple Business listings, plus the main Australian directories, and keep them matching your website. Each month we also check which of your pages Google has left out and why, fix what's on our side, and ask Google to look again.
Prefer to do it yourself? Start with the free listings guide.