Why ChatGPT doesn't recommend your business when neighbors ask it.
People now ask AI assistants for a plumber, a roofer, or a detailer the way they used to ask Google, and the assistants answer with two or three names. Here is how those names get picked, why yours probably is not one of them yet, and which parts of the fix are real work versus snake oil.
The number that explains the problem
That is the share of local businesses that ever get recommended by AI search, against roughly 35.9% that get some visibility through Google's local 3-pack. Out of a hundred businesses in your category, AI assistants are naming one.
The 1.2% figure comes from SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index, which analyzed over 350,000 business locations, and it should change how you read every pitch about AI visibility. The bad news is that you are almost certainly invisible to assistants today. The useful news is that so is nearly everyone you compete with, which means the groundwork is being laid on close to empty ground. The same research found only partial overlap between businesses that rank well on Google and businesses that AI recommends, so a strong Google position does not carry over on its own.
How an assistant picks two names out of a hundred
ChatGPT does not crawl your town looking for the best roofer. When someone asks it for a recommendation, it draws on what its training data and its live web lookups can confirm about businesses in the area, and it strongly favors what it can read and quote with confidence. That tilts the answer toward businesses whose information is machine-readable, consistent everywhere it appears, and written in a form an assistant can lift directly into a sentence.
In practice four things do most of the work. None of them is exotic, and all of them are checkable on your own site today.
Structured data an assistant can parse
Schema markup is a vocabulary that describes your business to machines: what you do, where you work, what hours you keep, what services you offer, what your customers asked and what you answered. A human never sees it. An assistant deciding whether it knows enough about you to say your name sees all of it. Most local business sites have either no schema or a bare-minimum block a builder generated years ago, and to a machine those sites are a shrug.
Reviews written where machines can quote them
Assistants love reviews because reviews are someone else vouching for you. But a review buried in a third-party widget, loaded by a script after the page renders, may as well not exist to a crawler. A reviews page built as plain readable text with review schema behind it gives an assistant sentences it can use, with a source it can cite. That difference decides whether your five stars count.
One page per question, not one page for everything
When someone asks an assistant "who repairs tile roofs in Clermont," the assistant looks for a page that answers that question. A single homepage that mentions fifteen services in one paragraph gives it nothing to grab. A site with a page per service and per area, each one answering its question plainly, gives the assistant exactly the shape of content it retrieves. This is the slowest part of the work and the part most providers skip.
The same name, address, and phone everywhere
Assistants cross-check. If your website says one phone number, your listings say another, and an old directory says a third, the machine's confidence in you drops, and low confidence means it names someone else. Boring consistency, everywhere your business appears, is a ranking factor here in a way it never quite was for classic search.
The honest part about llms.txt
You will see services selling llms.txt, a proposed file that describes your site to AI crawlers, as the key to AI visibility. We install one on every site we manage because it costs nothing and the standard may mature. But the evidence so far is that major AI crawlers largely ignore it, and we would rather tell you that than invoice you for magic. If a pitch leads with llms.txt, it is leading with the cheapest item on the menu. The work that shows up in answers is the schema, the quotable pages, and the reviews, because those are what assistants demonstrably read today.
What this costs with us
The full schema pack for your business type, service and location pages built one question at a time, a reviews page structured for assistants to quote, the AI crawler file, and consistent business details across the site. Added to the Gold plan at $80 a month, included in Diamond at $215, and it works on a website we did not build.
One promise you will not find anywhere on this site is a guarantee that ChatGPT, or any assistant, will recommend you. Nobody controls those answers, and anyone who guarantees placement is guessing with your money. What we commit to is the groundwork being done properly and verifiably: you can run the schema through a public validator, read the pages, and ask an assistant about your business yourself. With 1.2% of businesses showing up, groundwork on empty ground is the whole opportunity.
What you can check in the next ten minutes
Open ChatGPT and ask it what people should know about your business by name, then ask it to recommend your trade in your town. Note what it says and where it seems to be reading from. Then paste your homepage into Google's rich results test and see whether any structured data comes back. Those two checks tell you most of what an audit would, and if the answers are "it barely knows me" and "no structured data found," you now know exactly why the recommendations go elsewhere.
Questions people ask about AI recommendations
Can anyone guarantee my business gets recommended by ChatGPT?
No, and you should walk away from anyone who promises it. AI assistants decide what to recommend inside models that nobody outside those companies controls, and the answers change between versions and even between conversations. What can be done honestly is the groundwork: structured data a machine can read, pages that answer real questions, and reviews worth quoting. That raises your odds. Nobody can raise them to a certainty.
Does ranking on Google mean ChatGPT will recommend me?
Not reliably. The overlap between businesses that do well in traditional local search and businesses that AI assistants recommend is partial, which is exactly why a business can sit in the Google 3-pack for years and never once come out of a ChatGPT answer. AI assistants lean on readable structured data, text they can quote, and consistency across the web, and those are different strengths than the ones classic SEO rewards.
What is llms.txt and do I need it?
It is a proposed file that tells AI crawlers what your site is about, similar in spirit to robots.txt. We install one because it costs nothing and might help later, but we will be straight with you: there is no solid evidence yet that the major AI crawlers use it. Anyone selling llms.txt as the fix for AI visibility is selling the cheap part and skipping the work that shows results, which is schema, quotable pages, and reviews.
What does the Get found package include?
For $35 a month on the Gold plan it covers the full schema pack for your business type, service and location pages built one question at a time, a reviews page structured so assistants can quote it, the AI crawler file, and consistent name, address, and phone details across the site. It is included in Diamond, and it works on a website we did not build.
How long before I see anything change?
Be skeptical of anyone who gives you a date. AI assistants refresh what they know on their own schedule, and the honest framing is that this work makes you eligible to be recommended rather than scheduled to be. What you can verify right away is the groundwork itself: run your site through a schema validator, ask an assistant about your business by name, and watch whether the answers start drawing on your pages over the following months.
Keep reading
The constructive half of this story is how AI assistants pick which businesses to mention, which turns each signal into a to-do list. The page-per-question idea gets its own full treatment in should you have a page for each town you serve. For the visitors who do arrive, a website that answers customer questions covers keeping them, and what is SEO and how AI changed it supplies the background.
Do the groundwork before your competitors think of it.
The Get found package is $35 a month on Gold and included in Diamond. It works on your current site too, whoever built it, and everything it does is checkable by you.