how do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

ChatGPT recommends businesses it can find, understand and trust. In practice that means three jobs: publish pages that answer the exact questions your buyers ask it, make sure those pages are indexed by the search engines it reads, and build enough consistent mentions of your business elsewhere that its answer survives a double check.

Ask ChatGPT "who should I use for X" and one of two things happens. If it answers from memory, it draws on its training data, which is roughly the web as it stood when the model was built. If it runs a search first, and for buying questions it usually does, it reads a handful of live pages and builds the answer from them. Either way, it never consults a directory of approved suppliers. It recommends whoever the readable web makes easiest to recommend.

That is worth sitting with. There is no submission form and nobody to pay for placement. The input is the public description of your business: your site, your reviews, and everyone who mentions you.

Specificity. If someone asks for "a search agency that works with charities", the businesses that get named are the ones with a page that answers that exact pairing. A page titled for the niche beats a generic services page every time, because the assistant is looking for the cleanest match to the question, not the biggest brand.

Corroboration comes next. If your site claims one thing and your directories, reviews and press say something different, or say nothing at all, the assistant has less reason to repeat your claim. Consistent descriptions across the web are what let it recommend you with confidence.

Write one page for each question you want to be the answer to, with the full answer in the first two sentences. Check the page is indexed, because if search engines can't see it the assistants that search through them can't either. Then work on the echo: reviews, directory listings and third-party mentions that describe you the same way you describe yourself. Finally, test it monthly by asking ChatGPT your buyers' questions and noting who gets named.

Nobody can guarantee a ChatGPT recommendation, and anyone who promises one is guessing. What you can control is being findable, quotable and corroborated, which is what recommendations are made from. Retrieval-based answers can pick up good pages in weeks; becoming part of what the model remembers takes months and compounds.