More of your customers are skipping Google and asking ChatGPT "who's a good HVAC company near me?" So owners are asking me how to get their business recommended by ChatGPT, and a lot of people online are selling confident answers.
Here's the honest version. Nobody controls what ChatGPT recommends. Not me, not an agency, not the guy in your inbox promising "AI ranking." A lot of what gets sold as AI search optimization is guesswork. But some of it is documented by OpenAI itself, and the rest is the same local marketing basics that already work on Google. That's what this post covers.
How does ChatGPT find local businesses?
When ChatGPT answers a question about current information, like which roofers serve your town, it can search the web and show links to its sources. OpenAI's help article on ChatGPT search lays out a few things worth knowing:
- It uses outside search providers. OpenAI says ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers and rewrites your question into targeted searches it sends to them. Microsoft is one of the providers it names.
- It uses approximate location. ChatGPT may use an approximate location based on the user's IP address to give local results, and may share that location with third-party providers that supply local information like business listings.
- It can crawl your website. OpenAI says that to make a site eligible for inclusion, you need to allow its crawler, called OAI-SearchBot.
- No guarantees. OpenAI says it ranks results using multiple factors meant to surface relevant, reliable information, and that placement is not guaranteed.
What OpenAI doesn't publish is the full list of where business listings come from or how it weighs them. Anyone who tells you exactly how the ranking works is guessing.
The plain read: ChatGPT pulls from the open web, search partners, and listing data. So the businesses that show up are usually the ones that are easy to find, easy to read, and talked about in a lot of places. That's not a new trick. It's local SEO.
What you can't control (and should stop paying for)
ChatGPT's answers change from person to person and from day to day. Ask the same question twice and you may get two different lists. There's no ranking report, no dashboard, and no way to buy a spot in the organic answers.
So be skeptical of anyone selling "guaranteed ChatGPT placement." What you can do is make your business the obvious, well-documented answer, and then check in now and then to see whether it's working.
The owner's checklist for showing up in ChatGPT
None of this is exotic. Most of it pays off on Google too, which is the point. You're not betting your budget on an unproven tactic.
1. Make your name, address, and phone match everywhere
NAP means name, address, phone. If your website says "Ridgeline Heating & Air LLC" and Yelp says "Ridgeline HVAC" with an old number, any system pulling from multiple sources has to guess whether those are the same business. Don't make it guess. I cover how to clean this up in your Google Business Profile is your new homepage.
2. Finish your Google Business Profile and Bing Places listing
Your Google Business Profile is still where most local decisions happen. Bing Places is Microsoft's version, and since OpenAI names Microsoft as one of its search providers, a complete Bing listing is cheap insurance. Claim it, match it to Google, and fill in categories, services, hours, and service areas. If you run a franchise location, read this on franchise Google Business Profiles first, because corporate may control part of it.
3. Keep earning reviews
Reviews are text written by real customers about what you do and where you do it. That's exactly the kind of thing AI answers love to summarize. A steady stream of recent, detailed reviews helps on Google and very likely helps here too. Here's how to get more Google reviews without being pushy.
4. Build a website crawlers can actually read
This one surprises people. In a December 2024 analysis, Vercel reported that none of the major AI crawlers it studied, including OpenAI's, render JavaScript. They fetch the page's code but don't run it. That could change, but today it means a site whose text only appears after JavaScript loads may look empty to an AI crawler.
The quick test: open your site, right-click, and choose "View page source." If you can find your services, city names, and phone number in that raw code, you're probably fine. If it's mostly script tags and no readable text, talk to whoever built your site.
5. Give every service and area its own clear page
A single "Services" page that lists twelve things in one paragraph doesn't give anyone much to work with. A page called "Water Heater Replacement in Kirkwood" that explains what you do, what it usually involves, and who it's for does. Clear service pages and area pages make it easy for any system to match you to a specific question.
6. Get mentioned on local sites and directories
AI answers often lean on what other sites say about you: local news, chamber of commerce listings, neighborhood groups, trade associations, supplier "find a pro" pages, best-of lists. Every credible mention is another place your business shows up attached to your city and your service. Sponsor the Little League team and make sure the website links to you. That's marketing that works with or without AI.
7. Answer real questions in plain language
Write down the questions customers ask on the phone and answer them on your site. "How long does a roof replacement take?" "Do you service Florissant?" "What does a drain cleaning cost?" Plain questions with plain answers are easy for people and machines to pull from. This is the same idea behind the blog work I do for clients.
8. Don't block OAI-SearchBot
OpenAI runs a few different crawlers. Per its crawler documentation, OAI-SearchBot is the one used to surface websites in ChatGPT search, and sites that block it won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot is separate and relates to training OpenAI's models. You can allow one and block the other.
Some security plugins and hosting settings block "AI bots" with one checkbox. Ask your web person to check your robots.txt file (a small text file that tells crawlers what they may visit) and your firewall settings, and confirm OAI-SearchBot is allowed.
| Crawler | What OpenAI says it's for | Block it? |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | Surfacing websites in ChatGPT search | No, if you want to show up |
| GPTBot | Content that may be used to train models | Your call, it's separate |
| ChatGPT-User | Visits triggered by a user's request | Usually leave it alone |
What about llms.txt?
You may hear someone pitch you an "llms.txt" file. It's a proposed standard: a plain text file at the root of your site that summarizes it for AI tools. It's a proposal, not something OpenAI or Google has said they use.
In mid-2025, Google's John Mueller said that no AI system currently uses llms.txt, and that in his server logs the chatbots weren't even fetching it. I haven't seen solid evidence since then that it moves the needle for a local business. It's harmless to add if your web person has ten spare minutes. It is not worth paying anyone for, and it won't fix a thin website.
Test it yourself: ask ChatGPT
The best way to see where you stand is to ask. Use ChatGPT with search on, ideally logged out or in a private window, and try questions the way a customer would type them:
Try these: "Who are the best-reviewed HVAC companies in Webster Groves, MO?" / "I need a roof leak fixed in South County St. Louis. Who should I call?" / "What do people say about [your business name]?" / "Is [your business name] a good choice for [your service]?"
Then look at what it says and, more importantly, which sources it cites. If it cites Yelp, check your Yelp listing. If it cites a local "best of" article you're missing from, that's a lead. If it describes you wrong, find where that wrong information lives and fix it at the source.
Run the same handful of questions once a month and keep notes. It's not a ranking report, but it'll show you whether you're trending in the right direction.
The bottom line
Getting recommended by ChatGPT isn't a separate project from getting found on Google. It's the same work, done consistently: accurate listings, real reviews, readable pages, clear answers, and a business people talk about. If you want help with the website side, that's what I build. If you want the whole thing handled, book a call.
Alex Lamy16 years in marketing, from radio to agencies to running his own shop. Now a fractional marketer for St. Louis small businesses. You talk to him, he does the work.
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