To get ChatGPT to recommend your business, you make the sources it reads agree that you are a real, well-reviewed company that does a specific thing in a specific place. ChatGPT with search pulls from web search results, from licensed data including Yelp reviews and business information, and from the lists, directories and service pages those searches surface. There is no form to submit and no fee to pay. The method below is built from what the platforms publish and what local search experts report.
How ChatGPT finds local businesses
ChatGPT is not a directory. When someone asks it for a recommendation, it decides whether to search the web, rewrites the question into one or more search queries, reads what comes back and writes an answer with citations. OpenAI’s help article on web search says ChatGPT “sometimes partners with other search providers,” and the only search provider whose privacy policy it links is Microsoft’s. OpenAI does not publish which index it uses for a given answer, so treat “ChatGPT runs on Bing” as a strong inference rather than a stated fact. The practical consequence is the same either way: if Bing cannot find a page about you, ChatGPT probably cannot quote it.
The same article explains how local questions work. ChatGPT uses an approximate location from your IP address, and may rewrite “good restaurants near me” into “top restaurants San Francisco” before sending it to a search partner. That is why a customer in Royal Oak and a customer in Dearborn can get different answers to the same question, and why your service area needs to be stated in words on your site.
Two more sources matter. First, licensed data. On July 23, 2026, Axios reported that Yelp is licensing reviews, photos and other business information to OpenAI to give ChatGPT a source of real-time local recommendation data. Coverage of the deal in MarTech adds that it is non-exclusive, that Yelp branding and links will appear with the information, and that the companies plan to add Yelp’s Request a Quote feature later. OpenAI’s own help page already lists Yelp alongside OpenTable and Resy as a source of restaurant reservation availability inside ChatGPT. Second, lists. Whitespark’s 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors asked 47 local search experts to score what drives AI visibility, and their top factor was presence on expert-curated best-of lists, followed by a dedicated page for each service and prominence on industry-relevant domains. The report is careful to say none of the experts has access to any platform’s internals. It is informed opinion, not measurement.
One technical requirement is worth knowing. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says OAI-SearchBot is the crawler that decides whether a site can appear in ChatGPT search answers, and that sites which block it “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.” Check your robots.txt and any firewall or CDN rules before you do anything else. Blocking GPTBot, the training crawler, is a separate decision and does not affect search.
Step 1: Run a baseline
You cannot improve what you have not measured, and with AI answers the measurement is unusually easy to get wrong. Here is a method you can run yourself.
Write 10 prompts a real buyer would type. Not keywords. Full questions with a job, a place and a constraint, the way people talk to an assistant: “I need a contractor to replace the roof on a small warehouse in Metro Detroit. Who should I hire?” Pull them from your intake forms, your sales calls and the questions customers ask on the phone.
Run them logged out. ChatGPT’s search is available to people who are not signed in, and running it logged out keeps your own memory and history from shaping the answer. Use a fresh private window. If you have shared your location with ChatGPT before, assume it may still be inferring your city from your IP address, which is fine because your customers are in the same place.
Record four things per prompt: the engine, every business named in order, the sources cited in the Sources panel, and whether anything said about you is wrong. Then run the same prompts in Google AI Mode and Microsoft Copilot while you are at it. The sources column is the valuable part. It tells you which lists, directories and pages are doing the recommending.
Sample prompt log
| Prompt | Engine | Businesses named (in order) | Sources cited |
|---|---|---|---|
| “Who should I hire for [service] in [city]?” | ChatGPT (search, logged out) | List every business, in order | List every page, directory or review site shown in Sources |
| “I need a company to [specific job with a constraint] in [area].” | ChatGPT (search, logged out) | Same | Same |
| “Is [your business] any good?” | ChatGPT (search, logged out) | Note anything said about you that is wrong | Same |
| “Best [category] in [city] for a small business?” | ChatGPT (search, logged out) | Same | Same |
The table is a template; fill it with your own prompts. Our read is that specific prompts tied to a page that answers that exact question are won first, and broad “best agency in Detroit” prompts take longest.
Keep the prompt set fixed. Change the wording and you cannot compare months. Add prompts if you must, but never edit the originals.
Step 2: Make your business facts agree everywhere
AI assistants corroborate. If your site says one address, Yelp another and an old Facebook page a third, every system has a reason to hedge. Start with a spreadsheet: legal name, trade name, street address, phone, website, founding year, primary category, service list and service area. Then make every public surface match it exactly: your site footer and contact page, your LocalBusiness structured data, Google Business Profile, Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Business, Facebook, LinkedIn and any industry directory your customers use.
Founding year deserves a mention because assistants love it. “Which agency has been around the longest?” is a question ChatGPT answers from whatever dates it can find. If your founding year appears only in a paragraph on your About page, it may never be read. Put it in your structured data and your profiles too.
Step 3: Finish your Google Business Profile
ChatGPT does not read your Google Business Profile directly as far as anyone outside OpenAI knows. Finish it anyway, for two reasons. Google’s own AI Overviews and AI Mode serve the same customers, and the profile is where most of your reviews live. Google’s local ranking guidance states that “businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results” and that “there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” Complete means the right primary category, services with descriptions, accurate hours, and current photos and video. Our guide to Google Business Profile photos and video covers the shot list.
Step 4: Claim Yelp and Bing Places
These two listings matter more for ChatGPT than for almost any other channel, and most local businesses outside hospitality have ignored both.
Yelp first. Under the licensing deal, your Yelp reviews, rating, photos and business details can appear inside ChatGPT answers with Yelp branding. Claim the listing, fix the categories, upload current photos of your work and your team, and reply to reviews. BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey of 1,002 US adults found 24% of consumers wrote reviews on Yelp, third behind Google and Facebook, so the review flow is real even if your customers never mention it.
Bing Places next. Microsoft’s Bing Places for Business lets you claim a listing free, and Whitespark’s guide to Bing Places describes an import option that pulls your Google Business Profile in during setup and keeps the two in sync. Whitespark’s view, which matches ours, is that Bing Places does not get repackaged by ChatGPT but does shape the web results ChatGPT looks at. While you are in Microsoft’s tools, add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools. If your CMS supports IndexNow, turn it on. Microsoft’s page lists Wix, Duda, Shopify and GoDaddy builders as having it built in, and Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO and SEOPress as WordPress plugins that enable it. IndexNow tells Bing when a page changes so it does not wait days to recrawl, though Microsoft notes it does not guarantee indexing.
Step 5: Earn citations on lists and directories
This is the slowest step and, on Whitespark’s expert survey, the most valuable. Go back to your prompt log and look at the sources column. The lists and directories that keep appearing are your targets. For most Detroit service businesses that means a handful of national directories in your category, the local business press, neighborhood and industry roundups, and whatever “best X in Detroit” pages a search for your service turns up.
Earn them the honest way. Make sure your directory profiles are complete and point at the right page on your site, not just the home page. Pitch roundups with a real story and good photos. Never pay for a review or a “featured” spot that is not disclosed as advertising. The FTC’s rules on reviews and endorsements apply to AI-era marketing exactly as they did before.
Step 6: Build one page that answers each prompt
State in the first paragraph of each service page who you are, what you do, where and for whom. AI answers are assembled from text an engine can quote, and a page that says “we offer a range of creative services” gives it nothing.
For each service you want to be recommended for, publish a page that opens with a plain two-sentence answer, names your city and service area in words, lists what is included, gives real examples with numbers where you have them, and ends with FAQs written the way buyers ask assistants. Google’s guidance on AI features says the same thing from the other side: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode,” and “you don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features.” Our guide to how AI search picks local businesses covers the evidence behind this in more depth.
Step 7: Keep reviews coming
Reviews feed ChatGPT twice: through Yelp’s licensed data and through every review site and best-of list that uses ratings to rank. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey found 74% of consumers look for reviews written in the last three months, and 31% will only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher, up from 17% the year before. A burst of 40 reviews in one month followed by silence helps less than four a month for a year. Build the ask into your process: a link in the invoice email, a card at the counter, a text after the job closes. Reply to all of them.
Step 8: Measure monthly, three ways
Repeat the prompts. Same 10 prompts, same engines, logged out, once a month, into the same log. Count a prompt as won only when you are named in consecutive months. Answers vary run to run, so a single appearance is noise. A single appearance on a specific prompt says nothing about the broader, more generic ones.
Ask every lead. Add “How did you find us?” to your contact form and your first call, and record the answer verbatim. “ChatGPT told me” is now a real answer. It is the only measure that ties the work to revenue.
Check Google’s side. Google’s Search Console now includes Search Generative AI performance reports, announced June 3, 2026 and rolled out to all sites worldwide as of August 31, 2026. They show impressions, pages, countries and devices for AI Overviews and AI Mode. There is no equivalent report from OpenAI, which is why the prompt log and the lead question carry the weight for ChatGPT.
What a win looks like, and what it does not
The measure that matters is not a screenshot of a prompt, but a lead who tells you an assistant is how they found you. Broad prompts such as “best marketing agency in Detroit for a small business” are a different contest: Whitespark’s experts point to best-of lists and large review counts for those.
Our read, and it is a judgment rather than a finding, is that specific answer-first pages can win specific prompts quickly, while generic prompts are harder and take longer. That is why the baseline and the monthly log matter more than any single win. Without them you would see the good screenshot, assume the job was done, and miss the prompts you are still losing.
How we handle this at RAW Digital Group
RAW Digital Group offers AEO to Detroit and Michigan businesses, with our own crew producing the photo and video. No placement is guaranteed, because none can be. See our AI search optimization (AEO) service.