How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?

First, the thing nobody tells you

There is no submission form. There is no directory to pay. Nobody at OpenAI, Google or Anthropic can be persuaded to include you, and anyone offering to get you into ChatGPT for a monthly fee is selling something they do not have.

What assistants do is read the open web, and repeat what they can understand and trust. So the work is the same work as ever, done for a reader who cannot skim.

What actually gets you quoted

Answer the question in the first sentence. An assistant lifts short, self-contained passages. A page that opens with three paragraphs of throat clearing gives it nothing to lift. A page that opens with the answer gives it exactly what it needs.

Use the words people actually use. Not your internal name for the service. The question as your customer would type it.

Say the boring facts out loud, in text. Your address, your prices, your hours, what you do and do not do. If a fact only exists in an image, a PDF or a booking widget, it does not exist.

Make your facts agree. The same business name, address and phone number everywhere, on your site and on every listing. Contradictions do not make a machine pick one, they make it trust all of them less.

Add structured data. Schema.org markup states in a fixed format what your page says in prose. It is not magic and it will not rescue a thin page, but it removes ambiguity, and ambiguity is what gets you left out.

Be citable somewhere else too. Assistants lean on sources they already consider reliable. A professional body, a local news piece, a real directory for your sector. One genuine mention is worth more than fifty of the other kind.

What does not work

Keyword stuffing. Publishing thin pages at volume. Blocks of text written for machines rather than people, which read badly to both. Anything that begins with the phrase AI SEO hack.

The honest limits

Nobody can promise you a mention, and we do not. Assistants change what they draw on, they disagree with each other, and two people asking the same question can get different names back. It is not a ranking you can hold.

What you can do is make yourself the easiest business in your area to describe accurately. Then, when an assistant is asked, you are the low risk answer.

How to check where you stand

Ask them. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI results, and ask the question a customer would ask: the best accountant in Canterbury, or a therapist near me who works with teenagers. Write down who gets named, and whether you do.

Do it monthly, in the same words each time. That is a free, honest measurement, and it is the same one we run.