How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Google’s AI Answers

There is no secret trick for getting your business recommended by ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews or other AI assistants. They mostly draw on the same things as ordinary search and maps: pages they can crawl and read, clear facts about what you do and where, business details that match everywhere, reviews, and mentions on other reputable sites. Google states plainly that its AI features need no special optimisation beyond normal SEO. So: let crawlers reach your site, give each service and area a clear page in Greek and English, keep your Google, Bing and Apple listings in agreement, and measure what arrives.

That is less exciting than the “GEO” and “AI SEO” packages now sold to small businesses, but it is what the official documentation supports. This guide is for owners in Greece, from an electrician in Katerini to rooms to let in Olympiaki Akti: how the assistants find you, what matters technically, what to skip and how to measure it.

How AI assistants find and choose local businesses

Ask an assistant “who can repair my air conditioner in Katerini?” and it usually does not answer from memory. It runs searches, reads a handful of pages and listings, and writes a summary with links. The details differ by product:

• Google AI Overviews and AI Mode build answers from Google’s own index. To be shown as a supporting link, a page “must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet”, according to Google’s guidance on AI features. Google adds that these features may use a “query fan-out” technique, running several related searches to build one answer.
• ChatGPT search uses OpenAI’s crawler, OAI-SearchBot, to surface websites, alongside third-party search providers and content supplied by partners (OpenAI). OpenAI does not publish a full list of where local listings come from; independent analyses, such as one by Peec AI in September 2026, point to a mix of Google and Bing data and review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. Treat that as an informed finding, not official fact.
• Microsoft Copilot draws on Bing. Bing Webmaster Tools now has an AI Performance report that counts how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing’s AI-generated summaries.
• Perplexity uses its own crawler, PerplexityBot, which it says is designed to surface and link websites in its results and is not used to train AI models.
• Siri and Apple Maps take business details from Apple Maps place cards, which owners manage for free through Apple Business Connect.

Google’s position is the clearest. Its guidance says: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” You do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup. It recommends ordinary good practice instead: allow crawling, link your pages to each other, put important content in text, keep structured data consistent with the visible page, and keep your Business Profile up to date.

For local questions, the three factors Google uses for maps still apply: relevance, distance and prominence (Google Business Profile Help). You cannot change distance. Almost everything below is about relevance (does the assistant understand what you do and where?) and prominence (do customers and other sites vouch for you?).

Technical basics: crawlers, HTML and speed

Let the right crawlers in

Several AI companies run more than one bot, and each is controlled separately in your robots.txt file. Blocking the wrong one can quietly remove you from AI answers, while blocking another changes nothing about search.

Sources: OpenAI’s crawler documentation, Google’s crawler documentation and Perplexity’s crawler documentation. For most local businesses the sensible default is to allow the search bots: Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. Allowing training bots such as GPTBot, or the Google-Extended token, is a separate decision; according to the companies themselves, blocking them does not remove you from their search results. OpenAI and Perplexity both say robots.txt changes can take up to about 24 hours to apply.

Serve real HTML

Googlebot runs JavaScript. Many AI crawlers do not. In a December 2024 analysis of its network traffic, Vercel reported that “none of the major AI crawlers currently render JavaScript”, including OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s crawlers and PerplexityBot, with Gemini (which uses Googlebot’s infrastructure) and Applebot as exceptions (Vercel). Crawlers change, so treat that as a snapshot, but the safe conclusion holds: if your services, prices or hours only appear after scripts run in the browser, some assistants may see an almost empty page.

To check, use “View page source” in your browser (not the element inspector). Your business name, services, area, phone number and key prices should be there as plain text. Server-rendered or statically generated sites pass easily; some single-page apps and script-heavy themes do not. Price lists and menus published only as images or PDFs have a similar problem.

Keep it fast

Assistants fetch pages while composing an answer, and a slow or failing page is easy to skip. Speed matters even more for the people who click through on a phone. Google’s Core Web Vitals remain a sensible target.

Say plainly what you do, where, and in which languages

Assistants match a question to pages that clearly answer it. “Quality and reliability since 1995” answers nothing. A page titled “Air-conditioning repair in Katerini and Paralia”, listing brands, villages covered, response times and a starting price, answers a lot.

• One page per main service. A builder who does renovations, roofing and insulation should have three pages, not one “Services” paragraph.
• Name the places you serve. Katerini, Paralia, Olympiaki Akti, Litochoro: write the areas you actually cover on the relevant pages. Our guide for businesses in Katerini and Pieria covers local pages in more detail.
• State the facts people ask about. Hours and season dates, price ranges, languages spoken, parking, step-free access, how to book.
• Answer common questions as visible text. Since 2023 Google has shown FAQ rich results mainly for well-known government and health sites, so write FAQs for the reader, not for a search feature.
• Keep it current. An assistant that reads “open until 23:00” on your site and “closed for the season” on Google may repeat either.

Language matters more than most owners expect. Assistants reply in the language of the question, and a German family planning a week in Pieria will ask in German or English. A Greek-only site gives the assistant less to work with. Greek and English versions, each with its own URL, are the baseline on the coast; add more languages for key pages if your guests justify it. Our restaurant website guide explains how to keep the versions from drifting apart.

Keep your business details identical everywhere

Assistants cross-check sources. If your name, address, phone and hours differ between your website, Google and a directory, you make it harder for any system to be confident about you. Consistency is dull, and it works.

• Google Business Profile: the most important single listing for local search in Greece. Use the most specific category, keep special hours current (Easter, 15 August, season start and end), and link to the right page on your site.
• Bing Places for Business: free, and it feeds Bing search and Bing Maps, which Copilot draws on. Microsoft’s relaunched version lets you import your listings from Google, which takes minutes.
• Apple Business Connect: also free. Apple says the details appear across Apple Maps, Messages, Wallet, Siri and other apps.
• Facebook, Instagram, TripAdvisor and sector directories: the same name, phone and hours. Remove duplicate listings left over from an old owner or number.

On your website, add LocalBusiness structured data in JSON-LD, or a more specific type such as Restaurant, Hotel or Electrician, following Google’s local business guidelines. Google says no special schema.org markup is needed for its AI features and that structured data must match the visible text. Treat it as a way to remove ambiguity, not as a lever.

Reviews and mentions from other people

Prominence is the part you cannot write yourself. Google says “more reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking”, and that prominence also reflects information from across the web, such as how many websites link to your business (Google). An assistant asked for “the best” option leans on the same evidence.

• Ask satisfied customers for a Google review, with a direct link or a QR code at the till. Never buy reviews or write them yourself.
• Reply to reviews, including critical ones, briefly and in the reviewer’s language.
• Get listed where locals and visitors already look: municipal and regional tourism sites, business associations, the local chamber and partners you genuinely work with.
• Earn real mentions: sponsor a local event, give the local paper a useful quote, publish something helpful such as a guide to beaches near your rooms. One genuine article on a respected local site beats dozens of directory submissions.

Picture a guesthouse in Litochoro that a hiking club’s site recommends to climbers, whose reviews keep mentioning early breakfasts, and which has a clear English page on trail access. Asked “where should I stay before climbing Olympus?”, an assistant has far more reason to suggest it than a bigger hotel with a generic site. None of that is an AI trick.

The signals at a glance

Is llms.txt worth it?

llms.txt is a proposal, first published by Jeremy Howard in September 2024, for a plain Markdown file at /llms.txt that gives AI tools a short, curated guide to a website. It is a proposed convention, not an agreed standard, and none of the major assistants has confirmed that it affects whether or how they cite a site. Google’s AI features guidance says you do not need to create AI text files to appear.

We serve one at oryaone.com/llms.txt, generated from the same content as our pages so it cannot fall out of date, as a low-cost experiment rather than a strategy. If your developer can add one in an hour, fine. If someone quotes hundreds of euros for it, spend the money on your service pages instead.

What not to waste money on

• Guaranteed ChatGPT placement. Nobody outside these companies controls what their assistants recommend, and answers change with the wording, language and location of the question. OpenAI’s own help page says “Placement is not guaranteed” (OpenAI Help Center). A package that guarantees a spot is promising something it cannot deliver.
• Prompt-stuffing. Long lists of questions people might type into ChatGPT, or text telling “AI assistants” to recommend you. Google’s spam policies treat keyword stuffing as spam, and customers find it odd.
• Hidden text and bot-only pages. Showing crawlers different content from visitors is what Google calls cloaking; hidden text placed to manipulate search engines is also on its spam list.
• Hundreds of AI-written area pages. “Electrician in [every village in Pieria]” pages with the place name swapped fit Google’s description of scaled content abuse.
• Costly AI visibility dashboards for a single-location business. A monthly manual check, described below, tells you most of what you need.

If you want to spend on AI, spend it where it saves time or money inside the business. Our article on where AI actually pays off for small businesses is a more useful place to start than any “AI SEO” package.

How to measure whether it is working

• Google Analytics 4. Under Reports, Acquisition, Traffic acquisition, look at session source for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and Copilot. ChatGPT normally adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends, although a bug briefly removed the tag in October 2026 (Search Engine Roundtable). Some visits from AI apps may arrive without a referrer and show up as direct, so read these numbers as a minimum.
• Google Search Console. Google says traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in your overall search traffic, under the Web search type, rather than in a separate report.
• Bing Webmaster Tools. The AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026, shows citations in Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries, the pages cited and the grounding queries behind them.
• Ask the assistants yourself, on a schedule. Write 10 to 15 questions a real customer would ask, in Greek and English: “best fish taverna in Paralia Katerinis”, “αξιόπιστος ηλεκτρολόγος στην Κατερίνη”, “apartments near the beach in Olympiaki Akti with parking”. Once a month, run the same list in ChatGPT, Gemini, Google, Copilot and Perplexity, ideally in a private window, and note whether you appear, what is said and which sources are cited.
• Ask your customers. Add “AI assistant (ChatGPT or similar)” to “How did you find us?” on your booking or enquiry form.

Expect noise. The same question can get different answers on different days, and local results depend on where the person asking is (ChatGPT, for example, may use an approximate location based on IP address, according to the OpenAI Help Center). Judge the trend over three to six months, not a single answer.

A 30-day checklist

Week 1: see what the assistants see

1. Search for your name and your main service plus town on Google, Bing, ChatGPT and Perplexity, and note what each says.
2. Check robots.txt, and ask your host whether any firewall or CDN blocks the search bots.
3. View the source of your main pages: are name, services, area, phone and prices there as text?

Week 2: fix your listings

1. Update your Google Business Profile: category, hours, special hours, services, photos, website link.
2. Claim or update Bing Places (import from Google) and Apple Business Connect.
3. List every other place you appear and correct or remove anything outdated.

Week 3: improve your pages

1. Write one page per main service, naming your areas, with prices or ranges and a short FAQ.
2. Publish Greek and English versions of those pages, each with its own URL.
3. Add LocalBusiness structured data and validate it with Google’s Rich Results Test.

Week 4: start measuring and earning mentions

1. Set up a GA4 view of AI referrals and verify your site in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
2. Write your fixed list of test questions and record the first answers.
3. Ask ten recent customers for a review, and contact two or three local sites where you could genuinely be listed.

If you would rather not do Week 1 yourself, our free website check gives you a written report on speed, how the site works on phones, how it shows up on Google and basic accessibility.

How Orya One can help

Orya One is a software house in Paralia Katerinis, founded in 2026 by data scientist Dimitris Kampouridis, and you work directly with the people building your site. The websites we build cover the basics in this guide from the start: pages that load as real HTML, Greek and English versions, structured data and fast mobile performance. There is no separate “AI package”, because there is nothing separate to sell. Essential sites start from €400 (up to five pages, live in one to two weeks) and Growth from €1,000 (custom design, Greek and English, online booking and analytics, three to six weeks). Every quote is fixed and in writing, and once the project is paid in full, the code is yours.

If you want to know how your business looks to search engines and AI assistants today, start with the free website check, or send us a short note about your business and the questions your customers ask. We will tell you honestly what is worth fixing first.