How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

The LLMs recommend whoever they feel most confident about. That's my working model, and everything I'm doing on my own sites follows from it.

"You have tons of citations of your work all over the internet, constantly creating content, and all your information matching."

Does this actually work for a small business?

It worked for me before I was trying. I put up one website about AI and forgot about it, and ChatGPT started citing me as the AI expert in Williamson County, a 700,000-person county. I'm not even doing a good job at it.

Texas AI Lab is my niche site about putting AI to work. I know it got cited number one in ChatGPT because after I gave a talk at a commercial real estate brokers networking event, a woman sent it to me. In the next 10 days I got three calls from basically that website, all asking for trainings.

The caveat: when I ran the search live in front of someone, I didn't show up. The businesses that did had a Google business listing in the map pack, and I didn't. Results move around. Cover the basics too.

What makes an AI confident in one business over another?

• Being everywhere as a real person. A YouTube channel about your field, clips on Instagram and Shorts, answers on your local subreddits, even Quora. All of that gets picked up by the LLMs.
• Other trusted sites talking about you. Your own website is necessary, but it isn't enough. AI wants to see credible pages citing you.
• Consistent content. Not a burst of posts in January and silence after. A steady record, like a blog or public newsletter updated at least weekly.
• Matching facts. Same name, location, services and numbers everywhere. I scored myself 30 out of 100 on an AI visibility audit mostly because my own facts conflicted.
• Answers to real questions. Pages written the way people ask, not the way businesses describe themselves.

Who counts as a trusted third party?

Google reviews still matter, but they aren't the only thing anymore. AI also looks at who is talking about you. I believe local media companies writing about local businesses count for more than the business's own website. Chambers of commerce and the Better Business Bureau are the other obvious ones.

Get on listicles. Yelp is one, though I don't think much of it. Find the local "best of" lists, and pay for the chamber listing. That's part of why I'm excited about WilCo Guide: it can be the local listicle businesses want to be on. The pitch is local exposure, not one newsletter ad. A free business profile on a site built for AI, articles about you, and multiple newsletters, because AI picks the best roofer by seeing your information on lots of sites it trusts. More in how to build a directory AI will cite.

When we feature a business, we hand them the content too. We put it on our channels, they put it on theirs.

Are blog posts dead?

The old way is. Long, boring keyword blogs written for Google rankings are almost completely dead. I think video, social media and Reddit matter more to AI now than blog articles, and most small businesses haven't realized that yet. That's my opinion from what I'm seeing, not a study.

What still works is writing for the question someone types when they're stressed. When a house burns down or a roof blows off, the first thing a lot of people do is ask ChatGPT or Google something like "how do I make sure I don't get screwed by my insurance company?" For a public adjuster directory I built, the articles answer those exact questions.

Same idea for directory data. Instead of name, hours and description, store answers to specific questions, like whether a provider makes house calls for a senior with an ear infection. Specific beats generic.

Not all of it. For person-based businesses like insurance agents, a lot of the value is making the models see that person as a trusted expert. On my directory, the stack of articles on each business page is there for AI and search to cite. Regular people mostly won't read it. That's fine. It still has to be true, and it still has to come from the real owner. See the 10-80-10 rule.

Do "best X for Y" pages still work?

My theory is yes, for AI search. Google is cracking down on self-promotional listicles, but a page like "best CRMs for insurance agents" with your product listed first can still get surfaced by ChatGPT. A co-builder pointed me to a well-known CRM company that built hundreds of competitor-comparison pages for exactly this reason. Treat that as a theory, not a proven result.

What about the technical side?

1. One domain. Put everything on the root domain so authority isn't split. More on that in subdomain vs. root domain.
2. Own your archive. I copy every newsletter issue to my own site with clean headings, canonical tags, structured data, a sitemap and llms.txt entries.
3. A summary for AI. Your site should state plainly who you are, where you work, and who you serve.
4. A Google business listing. My live-demo miss taught me that one.

Being everywhere is a lot of work, which is why I'm building lightbreak to be one place that pushes the same content out to a public newsletter, a blog and social. As of June 2026, the social part wasn't built yet.

Why start now?

Because AI answers only recommend one business, maybe two, and you need to be one of them. A business owner posted publicly that ChatGPT was sending him about five new clients a day and he wanted help tripling it. My own guess is that being the one ChatGPT names will soon be worth three to five times more than a top-three spot in Google.

It feels like 1998 for the internet. The people who figured out how to get found by Google early crushed it. The window right now is really small before people figure this out.

Proof of work is dated, too. In two or three years, when everybody claims they're good at this, I'll be able to say: look at what I was talking about in 2026. You can't backdate a track record.

And the honest part: nobody controls what a model recommends. I can't promise you a mention and neither can anyone else. You build the foundation that makes you easy to verify, then you earn the exposure.