A customer walks into your shop and mentions, almost in passing, that they asked ChatGPT for a recommendation and your business came up. That’s not a rare fluke anymore. A 2026 survey of 75 US small-business search marketers, run by EMARKETER together with Semify, found that nearly 30% of them have had a customer say exactly that — they found the business through an AI-generated answer, not a traditional search result.
Thirty percent isn’t everyone. But it also isn’t nothing, and it’s not something you can influence the old way. You can’t bid on a keyword to get ChatGPT to say your name. There’s no ad slot inside a generated sentence. What you can do is make your business easier for these tools to find, trust, and describe accurately — and that’s a real, learnable set of habits, not a mystery.
This guide walks through exactly what those habits are.
First, a Quick Reality Check on What “Getting Recommended” Means
Before the tactics, one thing worth clarifying. Getting mentioned, getting cited as a source, and getting actively recommended are three different things. A model might pull a fact from your website without ever saying your business name out loud. It might name a competitor instead, even while quoting a page you wrote. These outcomes look similar from the outside. But they come from different causes. Mixing them up is an easy way to think you’re “doing everything right” while still losing the actual recommendation.
We’ve written a more detailed measurement method for this — built for a different audience — in [our guide on getting a SaaS company mentioned in ChatGPT and AI Overviews]. If you want to actually test where you stand before changing anything, that piece walks through how. Here, we’re focused on the fixes themselves: the things a small business can actually go do.
Get Your Basic Facts Straight Everywhere (Name, Address, Phone)
This is the least exciting advice in this whole guide. It’s also the most foundational. AI answer engines, like traditional search engines before them, pull information about local businesses from multiple places at once. That includes your website, your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, industry directories, maybe a local chamber of commerce listing. If your business name is written three different ways, your phone number is outdated on one listing, or your address has a typo somewhere, you’re not giving these systems a clean answer. You’re giving them a puzzle.
Consistency here is called NAP consistency in the SEO world — Name, Address, Phone. It’s not a new idea, and it’s not exclusive to AI search. But it matters more now, not less. That’s because an AI model is often pulling from several sources at once, not just picking one best-ranked page. A mismatch a human would shrug off can be exactly the kind of thing that makes a model skip you, or quietly recommend someone else whose details line up cleanly.
The fix is unglamorous: go through every place your business is listed online — your website footer, Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, Instagram bio, any directory you’re on — and make sure the name, address, and phone number match, character for character, everywhere. It takes an afternoon. It’s worth the afternoon.
Claim and Actually Complete Your Google Business Profile
If you’ve claimed your Google Business Profile and never touched it again, this is worth a second look. A complete profile gives both traditional search and AI systems a much stronger, clearer signal about who you are and what you do than a bare-bones listing. That means an accurate category, current hours, real photos, a filled-out description, answered Q&A, and the occasional post.
This is worth prioritizing for a simple reason: it’s fully within your control, it’s free, and it’s fast to improve. Compare that to earned media or reviews, which take longer to build and depend partly on other people. A weekend spent properly filling out your Google Business Profile is one of the highest-leverage things on this whole list.
Show Up Where Your Customers — and the AI Models — Are Already Looking
AI answer engines don’t invent information out of nowhere. They retrieve it from somewhere. If your business genuinely doesn’t exist on any of the marketplaces, directories, or review platforms relevant to your industry, there’s simply less material out there for a model to find you through.
This doesn’t mean signing up for every directory that will have you. It means being thoughtful about it. Ask which two or three platforms people in your specific category actually use to find businesses like yours. A local restaurant’s answer looks different from a plumber’s, which looks different again from a boutique’s. Pick the ones that matter for your category. Then make sure your listing on each one is complete, current, and matches the same basic facts you locked down in the NAP step above.
Schema Markup: Worth Doing, But Not the Shortcut It’s Sometimes Sold As
You may have heard that adding schema markup — structured data that helps machines read what’s on your page — is a fast way to boost your odds of being cited by AI. Let’s be honest about what the evidence actually says, because this is exactly the kind of claim that gets oversold.
Ahrefs ran a real, controlled test on this in 2026. They tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD schema markup between August 2025 and March 2026. They compared those pages against roughly 4,000 similar pages that didn’t add schema, then measured what happened to AI citations across Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and ChatGPT. The result was underwhelming for anyone hoping schema is a lever you can just pull. Citations on AI Mode and ChatGPT barely moved at all — the changes were so small, statisticians would call them no different from zero. Citations on Google AI Overviews actually dipped slightly. This held true even though 53% of the pages that did get cited across these platforms already had schema markup in place. So having schema and getting cited do tend to show up together. But adding schema didn’t cause more citations in this test. The more likely explanation: sites already strong enough to get cited are also more likely to have schema — not that schema itself did the work.
None of this means skip schema. It’s still low-cost, and it still helps machines, and search engines generally, read your page correctly. That removes a small technical barrier once you’re otherwise worth citing. Just don’t treat it as the fix. Treat it as basic housekeeping you do once and move on from.
Earn Mentions Where AI Models Actually Look — Not Just on Your Own Site
Here’s the finding that should probably reorder your whole priority list. Muck Rack analyzed more than a million AI prompts, in a study cited in a 2026 industry report from 5W Public Relations. It found that 85.5% of AI citations reference earned media — third-party sources talking about a brand — rather than the brand’s own website. Separate research out of the University of Toronto found something similar: AI engines cite earned media roughly five times more often than they cite brand-owned sites.
For a small business, that means something concrete. Local news coverage. A mention in a community blog. A feature on an industry site. A guest spot on a local podcast. Getting named in a “best of” list someone else wrote. These carry real weight with AI models in a way that polishing your own homepage simply can’t match. Your own website still matters. But it’s only half the picture. For most small businesses, that half already gets all the attention, while the other half — what other people say about you, elsewhere — gets ignored.
This doesn’t require a big PR budget. A local reporter covering small businesses, a community Facebook group, a niche blogger who writes about your industry, a podcast host looking for local guests — these are realistic, reachable opportunities for most small businesses. Treat this as an ongoing habit, not a one-time push.
Write Content That Actually Answers the Question
When someone does land on your own website, or when a model does pull from it, the content should earn that trust. That means writing in plain language that answers the actual questions your customers ask — not stuffing in keywords, not writing vague marketing copy about your “commitment to excellence.” A clear paragraph that directly answers “do you offer same-day appointments” or “what’s included in your basic package” is far more useful to both a human reader and a model looking for a clean fact to lift than a paragraph written primarily to rank.
Think of your own site as one honest source among several, not the whole strategy.
Reviews Still Matter — Possibly More Than Before
Reviews aren’t new advice. But they haven’t lost their importance just because AI search has entered the picture. If anything, a steady pattern of genuine, detailed reviews across Google, Yelp, and industry-specific platforms works like a consensus signal — multiple independent sources agreeing on what your business is actually like. That’s the same kind of agreement these systems tend to weigh heavily elsewhere. Remember the earned-media finding above: multiple outside sources saying the same thing carries real weight.
Ask satisfied customers for reviews. Respond to the ones you get, good and bad. Don’t buy fake ones. Beyond being dishonest, fabricated reviews are exactly the kind of noisy signal that undermines the very consistency these systems reward.
What to Actually Do First (So This Doesn’t Turn Into a To-Do List You Never Start)
Everything above is real and worth doing. But not all at once. If you’re starting from zero, here’s a sensible order. Lock down NAP consistency and your Google Business Profile first — both are fully in your control and fast to fix. Do a quick schema check next, mostly as basic housekeeping. Then treat earned media and reviews as an ongoing habit you build over months, not a task you finish in a weekend.
If you’re not sure where you actually stand right now, our [tool-stack guide for small businesses] includes a simple, twenty-minute manual check — asking real customer questions directly in ChatGPT and Perplexity and logging honestly whether you’re named — that’s worth running before you decide where to spend your time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I really get ChatGPT to recommend my business, or is this out of my control? You can’t control any single answer directly — these are generated fresh each time, not a fixed list you can buy your way onto. But you can meaningfully improve your odds by making your business easy to find, verify, and describe consistently across the sources these models actually draw from. That’s a real, learnable set of habits, even if no single fix guarantees a result.
Does adding schema markup guarantee my business shows up in AI answers? No. A 2026 Ahrefs study tracking 1,885 pages that added schema found it did not meaningfully increase AI citations on its own. It’s still worth doing as basic technical housekeeping, but don’t expect it to be the thing that gets you cited.
What matters more: my website or what other people say about my business online? Based on the real 2026 research available, what other people say about you — reviews, local press, directory listings, community mentions — appears to carry more weight than your own website content alone. Your website still matters, but it’s one source among several, not the whole strategy.
How long does it take to see a difference? The fast fixes — NAP consistency, completing your Google Business Profile, basic schema — can be done within a week or two. Earned media and a strong review base build up over months, the same way they always have. There’s no realistic shortcut to that second part.
Do I need to do this differently for ChatGPT versus Google’s AI Overviews or Perplexity? The core habits here — consistent facts, real presence on relevant platforms, earned mentions, honest reviews — help across all of them, since these systems tend to draw on overlapping types of sources. If you want to check how you’re actually doing on each engine specifically, the manual check described in our tool-stack guide covers that.
What to Read Next
If you run a B2B or SaaS business rather than a local small business, our guide on [getting a SaaS company mentioned in ChatGPT and AI Overviews] covers the fuller measurement methodology for that context. If you haven’t yet checked where you currently stand, our [AI marketing tool stack guide for small businesses] includes a quick, no-cost way to find out. And if you’d rather have a conversation than read another list, [reach out to our GEO/LLM SEO team] — we’ll tell you honestly which one or two things are worth your time first.