You can't buy a ranking in ChatGPT. There's no ad slot, no submission form. But AI recommendations aren't random either — models recommend businesses they can verify and describe confidently. Here's the playbook, in the order that pays off fastest.
1. Answer buyer questions in plain text on your site
AI recommends businesses whose sites already contain the answer. Go through the questions buyers actually ask — "how much does X cost," "do you do Y," "are you open weekends," "do you serve [suburb]" — and make sure each has a plain-English answer somewhere on your site. An FAQ page is the classic container, but a pricing table or a "service area" paragraph works just as well. Text, not images.
2. Publish the two files AI reads
- llms.txt — your business facts in one canonical file.
- LocalBusiness schema — the same facts, machine-readable, on every page.
Together they turn "AI has to interpret your website" into "AI reads your facts directly."
3. Make every source agree
Inconsistent info across your site, Google Business Profile, and directories is the #1 reason AI hedges instead of recommending. One sweep, one hour, permanent confidence boost.
4. Be specific about where you are and what you do
"Serving the greater metro area" means nothing to a model matching you against "best electrician in Cedar Park." Name your city, your neighborhoods, your actual service list. Specificity is what gets you matched to specific questions — and specific questions are the ones with buying intent.
5. Earn mentions that models can read
AI systems weight independent corroboration: local news mentions, chamber-of-commerce listings, supplier "find an installer" pages, genuinely earned reviews. This is old-fashioned local PR — it worked for Google for twenty years and it works for AI now. Skip anything that smells like a link scheme; answer engines quote sources, and you want the quotable kind.
6. Don't try to trick it
Keyword-stuffed hidden text, fake reviews, "as recommended by ChatGPT" badges — none of it works, and inconsistency between what you claim and what sources verify actively hurts. The entire game is making true facts easy to verify.
7. Measure, then re-measure
Baseline yourself today: run a free scan and see your A–F grade plus every AI answer verbatim. Do the fixes above. Re-scan in two weeks. AI models retrain and re-crawl constantly, so treat it like uptime monitoring, not a one-time audit — Starter tracks it weekly across Claude and ChatGPT for $29/mo.
The honest summary: get your facts straight, put them where AI reads, be specific, earn real mentions, and measure. No hack, no subscription to a "AI ranking service" — just making yourself the easiest business to recommend truthfully.