How to get your business cited by ChatGPT and AI Overviews

Small business owners keep asking a version of the same question: "How do I get my business in ChatGPT?" A customer typed "best plumber near me" or "Indian restaurant open late in Yokohama" into an AI assistant, got three names back, and theirs wasn't one of them.

The short answer is less exciting than the industry around it. Google and OpenAI both say, in their own documentation, that their AI answers are built on top of ordinary search crawling. If ordinary search can find your business, read your pages and trust what other people say about you, you have a fair chance of being cited. If it can't, no special trick fixes that.

I build websites for restaurants, trades businesses and recruitment agencies, and AI search is part of every build. Below is what the platforms actually say, what classic local SEO still does, and a checklist you can work through this week. Every claim about Google or OpenAI links to where they say it.

How do ChatGPT and AI Overviews find a business to cite?

Google AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google's normal search index. Google's guide to AI features for site owners says that to be shown as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet, and that "there are no additional technical requirements." It also says both features may use "query fan-out": running several related searches across subtopics and then showing a wider set of links. So a page that answers one narrow question well can still be picked up.

ChatGPT search works differently but on the same idea. OpenAI's crawler documentation lists three bots. OAI-SearchBot is the one for search, and OpenAI recommends allowing it in your robots.txt. Sites that opt out of it don't appear in ChatGPT's search answers, though they may still show up as plain navigation links. GPTBot is a separate crawler for training AI models, and blocking it doesn't remove you from search. OpenAI's ChatGPT search help page also says it can send rewritten queries to third-party search providers, and for location-based questions it can share a general location with partners such as business listing services.

What neither company publishes is a list of ranking factors for citations. Google says plainly that even pages meeting every requirement aren't guaranteed to be shown. So the honest goal isn't to game the selection. It is to be an easy, trustworthy source to pick.

Why local SEO still does most of the work

For "near me" questions, the facts an AI tool repeats about your business (opening hours, area, rating, phone) often come from the same places local search uses. Google's own AI features guide tells site owners to keep their Business Profile information up to date, which is a strong hint about where the local details come from.

Google's help page on how local results are ranked names three main factors: relevance, distance and prominence. It says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up, that more reviews and better ratings can help, and that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.

Then there is consistency. If your website says one phone number, your Google profile says another and an old directory lists your previous address, any system piecing your business together has to guess. Keep your name, address and phone number written exactly the same everywhere: your website, Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Facebook and the main directories in your industry.

What does "crawlable" mean for AI search?

This is the quickest thing to check. A site can look fine to a visitor and still be closed to crawlers.

• Check robots.txt. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. If you see "User-agent: OAI-SearchBot" or "User-agent: Googlebot" followed by "Disallow: /", that bot is blocked. A plain "User-agent: *" with "Disallow: /" blocks everyone.
• Check your hosting and CDN. Google's guide specifically mentions that crawling must be allowed by your CDN or hosting, not just robots.txt. Some bot-protection settings block AI crawlers by default.
• Put important information in text. Google asks for important content to be "available in textual form." A menu that only exists as a photo, or prices inside a PDF, are harder for any system to read.
• Don't block snippets by accident. A nosnippet or noindex tag left over from a redesign takes a page out of the running.

On my own site, the robots.txt allows everything apart from the admin area and a few internal API paths. That is the setup I'd suggest for most small business websites.

Write pages an AI answer can actually quote

AI answers pull short, specific facts. A homepage that says "quality service you can trust" gives them nothing to use. A page that says "We repair and service gas boilers in Kawasaki and south Tokyo, Monday to Saturday, with the call-out fee listed" gives them a lot.

One page per service

Give each main service its own page with a clear heading: what it is, who it's for, which areas you cover, roughly what it costs or how pricing works, and how to book. This is exactly how I set up the websites I build for trades businesses: services and areas written out clearly, because that's what both Google Maps and AI tools need.

Answer the questions customers really ask

Write down the questions you hear on the phone every week and answer each in two or three sentences. Do you deliver? Is there parking? How long does a quote take? Do you speak English? Put them on the relevant page, not hidden away. The homepage of my own site has a short FAQ like this, and one of its answers is literally about AI search.

Say who you are

Your business name, address, a real photo of the team and a short "about" page help people decide, and they give any system a clear picture of a real business. If you serve customers in two languages, a page per language helps both sets of searches; I wrote more on that in do you need a bilingual website?

Does structured data or llms.txt help?

Structured data is code in your page that labels the facts: this is the business name, these are the opening hours. Google documents LocalBusiness structured data for exactly this. It's useful, but Google is clear that no special schema is needed for AI features, and that your structured data should match what's visible on the page.

FAQ markup is worth a note. Since 2023, Google has limited FAQ rich results to well-known government and health websites, so adding it won't get you the old expandable questions in search. Write the FAQ for people anyway. The questions and answers on the page are what matter.

llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a site that lists its main pages for AI tools. It's a proposal by Jeremy Howard from 2024, not an official standard. Google's AI features guide says you don't need to create "AI text files" to appear, and in 2025 Google's John Mueller compared it to the old keywords meta tag. My own site has one at /llms.txt listing the main pages and services. It costs nothing to keep, but I don't expect it to change whether I'm cited, and I wouldn't pay anyone to make one.

A checklist you can do this week

None of these guarantees a citation. Together they remove the most common reasons a business gets skipped.

How do you know if it's working?

Start simple: ask ChatGPT and Google the questions your customers ask, in their words and with your town in them, and see who comes up. Answers vary between people and over time, so treat it as a rough monthly check, not a score.

For numbers, Google says traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in Search Console's Performance report under the "Web" search type. It isn't split out separately. Visits from ChatGPT often show up in analytics as referrals from chatgpt.com, so check your referral sources too.

Questions people ask

Can I pay to get my business into ChatGPT or AI Overviews?

Not as a ranking. Google says you can't pay for a better local ranking, and neither Google nor OpenAI offers a paid way to be cited in AI answers. Ads are a separate thing.

Is GEO different from SEO?

GEO (generative engine optimization) is a newer name for making your content easy for AI answers to use. In practice, for a local business, it's mostly good SEO: crawlable pages, clear content and a trusted local profile.

Should I block AI crawlers?

If you want to appear in ChatGPT search, allow OAI-SearchBot. If you'd rather your content wasn't used to train AI models, you can block GPTBot separately, and OpenAI says that doesn't affect search.

How long does it take?

Fixing robots.txt can register with OpenAI in about a day, according to its documentation. Google notes recrawling can take anywhere from days to months. Reviews and reputation build over months, not a week.

If you'd like a website built this way from the start, here's how I work with businesses.