How to get your business found on ChatGPT
A practical checklist for Australian local businesses: what to fix, in what order, which parts you can do yourself, and how to check whether it worked.
Before anything else, do this. It takes two minutes and it will tell you whether you have a problem.
Open ChatGPT. Type the question a customer would type. Not your business name, the question: “Who’s a good electrician in Penrith?” Then do the same in Gemini.
Write down who gets named. That is your starting position.
Most business owners have never done this once, and it is free.
First, there is nothing to sign up to
Worth clearing up before anything else, because it is the most common wrong assumption.
There is no ChatGPT business listing. No directory, no listing form, no verification badge, no paid placement. You cannot add your business to ChatGPT the way you add it to Google Business Profile, and if someone offers to do it for you, they are selling you something that does not exist.
ChatGPT finds you the way a person researching you would: by searching the open web and reading what it finds. So “how to get my business on ChatGPT” really means “how to be findable and readable on the web”. Same for Gemini, and same for the AI summary above Google’s results.
That is good news. It means the work is ordinary, and you can do a fair bit of it yourself.
Why you might not be named
Usually one of four dull reasons, in roughly this order of frequency:
- The model cannot find you. You are not mentioned anywhere it looks, or your site does not clearly say what you do and where.
- It cannot tell what you are. Your services page covers eight things in one paragraph, your trading name differs from your Google listing, or your site talks about “solutions” instead of the actual job.
- The details do not agree. Your phone number is different on two directories. Your address is missing a suite number in one place. A model cross-checking sources sees a conflict and quietly reaches for a business it is more confident about.
- Nobody else mentions you. You have a site and nothing else. Models lean heavily on third-party corroboration.
Notice that none of these are exotic. There is no prompt trick that fixes them.
The checklist, in order
I have marked the ones you can genuinely do yourself.
1. Make your details identical everywhere (do it yourself)
Business name, address, phone. Exactly the same characters, everywhere they appear: your website, Google Business Profile, Facebook, Yellow Pages, industry directories, your invoices.
“Suite 3, 14 Smith St” and “14 Smith Street, Suite 3” are different strings to a machine. Pick one and use it everywhere. This is boring, it takes an afternoon, and it is the single highest-value hour most local businesses can spend on this.
2. Give every service its own page
If you do emergency callouts, switchboard upgrades, and EV charger installs, that is three pages, not three bullet points on one page. Each one should answer the question a customer would ask, in the words they would use.
This is the same advice as for SEO. It is more important for GEO because a model looking for one specific service wants one specific page.
3. Write the way people speak (do it yourself)
If customers say “blocked drain”, your site should say blocked drain. If they say “hot water not working”, say that. Industry language loses to plain language, and it always did. Read your homepage out loud. If you would not say it to someone at the pub, rewrite it.
4. Put the facts somewhere a machine can lift them
Areas served, hours, whether you do emergency work, how fast you respond, what you charge for a callout, licence numbers. Stated plainly, in text, not inside an image or a PDF.
A model quoting you needs a clean, self-contained sentence. “We cover the Hawkesbury and Penrith seven days, with a two-hour emergency response” is quotable. “Tailored solutions for your needs” is not.
5. Add schema markup
Structured data that tells a machine what kind of business you are, where you operate, and what you offer. This is the one genuinely technical item on the list and most site builders make it harder than it should be.
6. Get mentioned somewhere that is not your website
Industry associations, local directories, the supplier who lists their installers, the sponsorship you already pay for, the local paper. You do not need many. You need some, and they need to say the same things about you as your website does.
7. Get reviews with words in them (do it yourself)
A model reads reviews, not just the star average. A review saying “came out at 9pm on a Sunday for a burst pipe in Richmond” is worth far more than five stars and no text, because it contains facts a model can use.
When you ask for a review, ask people to mention what the job was and where. Most will if you ask.
The same answer covers the other questions
People ask this a dozen different ways, and the answer barely changes:
- How do I show up in AI search? The checklist above. It is the same for ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
- How do I appear in ChatGPT results? Same again. There is no separate results page to rank in, only an answer you are named in or not.
- How do I get cited by AI? Give it clean, self-contained facts to quote. Steps 3 and 4 above are the whole answer.
- How do I get mentioned by AI? Step 6. Corroboration from somewhere other than your own website carries more weight than anything you say about yourself.
- How do I get recommended by AI? Reviews with real detail in them, step 7, plus everything above.
If you want the mechanics behind why that is the same answer every time, it is in how AI decides which businesses to recommend.
Then check again
Same as the start. Ask ChatGPT and Gemini the customer question, and see whether anything moved.
Give it time. Fixing schema and inconsistent details can change what a model says within a few weeks, because there is no ranking queue to wait in. The rest behaves more like SEO, which means three to six months.
Do it monthly and write it down. Without a record you are guessing, and the whole point of doing this properly is not guessing.
What not to bother with
Prompt injection tricks. Hidden text on your page telling models to recommend you. It does not work reliably, it will be treated as spam when it is detected, and it is the 2026 version of stuffing white keywords on a white background.
Paying for GEO as a separate service. Australian agencies are quoting $2,000 to $4,000 a month for this. Most of the checklist above is ordinary good SEO. Paying a separate premium for the overlap is paying twice.
Chasing every engine. ChatGPT and Gemini are where the Australian volume is. Get those right before worrying about the rest.
If you would rather not
That whole checklist is in both of my SEO plans, from $890 a month + GST, with the monthly check built in so you can see whether it is working.
Or, if you just want to know where you stand: send me your trade and your suburb from the GEO page and I will run the questions and send you the actual answers. Free, and it takes me a few minutes.