How to get your local service business recommended by ChatGPT

What's known

• OpenAI's search crawler has to be allowed in. OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot is the crawler that surfaces sites in ChatGPT's search features. Sites that block it won't appear in its search answers, though OpenAI says they can still show up as plain navigational links. This one you can check today.
• It's selective. SOCi, which sells local marketing software, looked at about 350,000 locations of multi-location brands and found ChatGPT recommended 1.2% of them, compared with 35.9% showing up in Google's local 3-Pack. That's chain locations, not independents, but it shows how narrow the list is.
• Doing well on Google doesn't carry over cleanly. In retail, the same report found only 45% overlap between the brands most visible in local search and the ones AI recommends.

What isn't known

OpenAI doesn't publish how it picks businesses. Most of what you'll read comes from SEO vendors, and they disagree with each other. Some say it leans on Bing's index, and some say it leans on directories like Foursquare. So treat anyone selling a guaranteed ChatGPT ranking as selling something they can't deliver. That includes me: one owner finding me this way is an anecdote, not proof of anything.

What I'd check on my own site

None of these are guaranteed to get you recommended. They're cheap, they're worth doing for regular search anyway, and they remove the obvious ways to be invisible.

1. Your robots.txt. Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt and make sure it doesn't block OAI-SearchBot. Some firewalls and CDNs block AI crawlers by default, so if you use one, check its settings too.
2. Say plainly what you do and where. A page titled "Garage Door Repair in [Your Town]" is clearer to a person and a machine than "Door Company". Give each main service its own page, and name the towns you really serve.
3. Add local business markup. Structured data states your name, address, phone and hours in a form software can read without guessing.
4. Keep your details the same everywhere. Same business name, address and phone on your site, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Yelp and the BBB. SEO vendors commonly recommend this, and it's sensible even though its exact effect isn't measured.
5. Claim Bing Places. It's free. Vendors disagree on how much it matters for ChatGPT, but you lose nothing by doing it.
6. Answer real questions on your site. What does a spring replacement involve? Do you work on commercial doors? Do you take emergency calls? Whatever customers ask you on the phone belongs on your site. Make sure your answers match what you actually do.
7. Get reviews that say something. Ask happy customers to mention the job and the town. This helps with people whether or not it helps with AI.

Test it yourself

Open ChatGPT and ask what a customer would ask: "Who should I call for garage door repair in [your town]?" Then ask "Why did you pick those?" Note who it names. Try it again next month. Answers vary from run to run, so don't read too much into one try.

What I did on my own site

I don't know exactly which page ChatGPT read when it sent that owner to me. What I can say is that my site has plain pages about what I do, who it's for and what it costs, and my robots.txt allows crawlers. Since then I've added plain guides on the question he asked, like connecting a website to Housecall Pro, and a short summary file for AI tools. llms.txt is a proposed convention, not a standard, and I haven't seen evidence that it changes anything. It was quick, so I did it anyway.

If you want it done

I do the on-site parts as a fixed-price job on the site you already have. No promises about rankings or recommendations, just a list of what changed.

Questions people ask

Sources

Checked November 5, 2026. These vendors change plans and features, so confirm in your own account.

• OpenAI: overview of its crawlers
• SOCi: In AI-Driven Discovery, Few Brands Are Chosen, Most Disappear (2026 Local Visibility Index)
• OpenAI: Ads in ChatGPT
• llms.txt proposal