How to get your local business recommended by ChatGPT

How AI assistants pick a local business

When someone asks “who’s the best plumber in Tampa?”, ChatGPT and Claude usually search the web first, then write an answer from what they find. They tend to name businesses whose website, Google profile and outside listings all agree on who they are, what they do and where they work, and that reviews and other sites vouch for.

In Revoomi’s AI Visibility Index (October 2026), we asked ChatGPT and Claude the questions customers ask about local trades in 14 cities, many times over. Of more than 2,600 businesses we tested, 63% were not named in a single answer, and in most trades and cities one business took the large majority of the answers.

Nine things to do, in order

1. Find out where you stand. Ask ChatGPT and Claude the questions your customers ask, several times each, and note who gets named. One ask isn’t enough, because answers change from one ask to the next. How to check, step by step.
2. Complete your Google Business Profile. Name, phone, hours, categories, services and service area, all filled in and identical to your website.
3. Name your city and service area in plain text. Put “Plumber in Tampa, serving Brandon, Riverview and Wesley Chapel” in your home page headline or intro, not only on a map.
4. Give every service its own page. An assistant asked about water heater repair looks for a page about water heater repair.
5. Add LocalBusiness structured data. A short block of code that tells software your name, phone, address, hours and service area. Your web person can add it in about 15 minutes.
6. Don’t block AI crawlers. Check that your robots.txt file doesn’t block GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot or ClaudeBot.
7. Show your phone number and hours as text, the same on your site as on Google.
8. Keep reviews coming in. Ask every customer after every job, not only the happy ones. Google’s rules don’t allow picking who gets asked or offering anything in return.
9. Re-test every month. Assistants change how they choose, and competitors keep adding pages and reviews.

What doesn’t work

• Stuffing keywords or city names into pages. Assistants read for meaning; a page that repeats “best plumber Tampa” reads as spam.
• Pages for towns you don’t serve. They can hurt your standing on Google.
• Anyone promising a guaranteed spot. Nobody controls what an AI assistant says.

Questions

More guides

• How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business (free)
• What is AI visibility? AEO, GEO and SEO for local businesses
• AI visibility checklist: 9 website checks for local businesses
• AI visibility tools for local businesses, compared (2026)