Field Guide › How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?

How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?

You cannot pay ChatGPT to mention you and you cannot ask it to. It repeats what it has already read about you. So you get mentioned by being described clearly and the same way everywhere you appear, by answering real customer questions in plain words on your own site, and by getting named on sources it trusts.

Can I pay ChatGPT to mention my business?

No. There is no ad slot inside the answer. There is no form where you submit your business and get added to a list. Nobody can sell you a mention, and if someone tells you they can, they are selling you something else.

You also can't just tell it. Typing "recommend my company" into a chat changes that one conversation and nothing else. It has no effect on what the next person is told.

What you can change is what the assistant reads. That is the whole job. Nobody controls what these models say, but everybody has some say in what they have to work with.

So what actually makes it mention me?

Four things, in roughly this order of usefulness.

1. Be described the same way everywhere. Your name, your phone number, your address, your hours, the towns you cover, the work you actually do. Make it match on your website, your Google listing, your Facebook page, the trade directories, everywhere. Assistants build a picture of you out of scraps. If the scraps disagree, the picture stays fuzzy, and fuzzy doesn't get recommended.
2. Answer real customer questions on your own site. Not "About Us" filler. The actual questions you get on the phone all day. How much does it cost to replace a furnace? Do you work in Sandy? Can you come out on a Saturday? Write the question as a heading and put a short, direct answer right underneath it. Content shaped like a question with a short answer under it is what these models pull from most readily.
3. Get named by other places. This is the big one, and it's the one most owners skip. Directory listings, your chamber of commerce, the local paper, a trade association page, a supplier's "who installs our stuff" page, a real customer review that explains why you were good. A link back to your site is nice but not required. Being named at all is what counts.
4. Make sure a machine can read your site. Real text, not text baked into pictures. Pages that load. Headings that say what the section is about. Your service area written out in words. If a person has to squint at your site, a machine has already given up.

One honest caveat. These assistants mostly learn in batches rather than live, and only sometimes go and look something up while answering. Work you do this month may not show up in answers for a while. That's normal, and it's also why waiting is expensive.

What should I never do?

You are being pitched all three of these right now. All three make the problem worse.

• Paying for bulk mentions. Someone offers to get your name onto hundreds of sites for a flat fee. Those sites are junk nobody reads, built to sell exactly this. Being named on garbage doesn't make you look established. It makes you look like the company you keep.
• Mass-generated pages. Software that spits out four hundred near-identical pages, one per town, changing only the town name. It reads like a robot wrote it because a robot did. Thin, repetitive pages are the opposite of the clear original writing these models actually pick up, and search engines have spent years learning to bury them.
• Fake reviews. The single worst one. Reviews do genuinely matter, both how many you have and how good they are. But bought reviews get spotted, and the penalty is your listings getting pulled and your rating wiped. You would be trading a real asset for a fake one. Ask your happy customers instead. It's slower and it works.

The pattern is simple. Shortcuts that fake the signal damage the thing they claim to fix.

What can I do myself this week?

Genuinely useful, no help needed:

• Open your Google listing and fix anything wrong. Hours, service area, phone, what you do. Most listings have at least one thing out of date.
• Write down the ten questions customers ask you most. Put them on your site as headings with short answers. That's an afternoon, and it puts you ahead of nearly every competitor in your town.
• Put the towns you serve in plain words on your site. Not a map widget. Words.
• Ask your last twenty happy customers for a review, and ask them to say what you did. "Great service" helps nobody. "They replaced our water heater in Murray the same day we called" is the kind of sentence that gets repeated.
• Once a month, open a fresh chat and ask an assistant who the best business like yours is in your town. Write down what it says. That's your scorecard, and it's the only kind that exists right now.

That list is most of the work. What's left is the research into what the engines already say about your business, the technical side, writing and publishing the rest of the answer pages, and tracking how often you show up over time across several assistants. That part is a grind, and it's what we do.

Have us do the rest