Start by asking the question yourself
Before you change anything, find out what ChatGPT says about your market today. Open a fresh browser window, sign out, and type the question a customer would type. Not your business name. The question.
- Best [service] in [your city]
- Who should I call for [problem] in [your city]
- How much does [service] cost in [your city]
- [Service] near [neighborhood] in [your city]
- Is [service] safe, and who does it well in [your city]
Write down every business the answer names, and open the sources it links to. Do this for ten questions and screenshot every one. That set of screenshots is your baseline. Without it you cannot tell later whether anything you did worked.
Two things to notice. First, how few businesses get named. In our checks a local answer usually names two to four, so the list is short and most of the town is invisible. Second, where the answer got its facts. Those source pages are the ones you have to be on.
Give ChatGPT a page it can actually read
Assistants read text. They do not read the words baked into your header image, and they do not sit through a slideshow. Most local sites lose here before anything else is even considered.
- One page per service. A single page called Services that lists nine things is worse than nine pages, because no page clearly answers any one question.
- Say the service and the city in the first two sentences, in normal words. Not premium bespoke solutions. We do Botox in Tampa.
- Use headings that match the questions people ask, then answer each one directly underneath.
- Put prices, or an honest range, on the page if you can. Cost is the question buyers ask most, and a page that answers it gets quoted.
- Real text, not pictures of text. Check by trying to select the words with your mouse.
- A page that loads fast on a phone. Crawlers give up on slow pages the same way people do.
The test is simple. Could a stranger read the page and say, in one sentence, what you do and where you do it. If not, an assistant cannot either.
Add the structured data
Structured data is a small block of code on your page that states your facts in a form machines read without guessing: name, address, phone, hours, service area, price range. Fill in what is true and leave out anything you cannot back up. The full field list is in LocalBusiness schema for small businesses.
Add FAQPage structured data for the questions you answer on the page, and Service structured data for each thing you sell. Done this way, what your visitor reads and what a machine reads cannot drift apart, which is the whole point.
Claim your listings, and make them match
When ChatGPT searches the web it uses Bing's index, so Bing Places is not optional. Most local owners have never opened it, which is exactly why it is the cheapest thing on this list. The detail is in ChatGPT search runs on Bing.
- Bing Places: claim it, fill every field, add hours and photos.
- Google Business Profile: claim it, set the right primary category, list your services one by one, keep hours current. That profile is a direct input to Google AI Mode.
- Apple Maps Business Connect, for the people asking on an iPhone.
- The two or three directories and review sites that actually appear when you search your service and city.
Then make them identical. Same business name, same address format, same phone number, everywhere. A suite number that appears in one listing and not another is enough to leave a machine unsure it is looking at one business, and an unsure machine names someone else.
Get reviews that use the words buyers use
Reviews are read as text, not just counted as stars. A review that names the treatment, the town and what actually happened gives an answer something to quote. Five stars and the word great gives it nothing. Ask recent customers, ask soon after the visit, and ask in a way that invites a sentence about what they came in for. The method is in the reviews AI actually reads. Never buy reviews and never write them yourself.
Re-run the same ten questions every month
Nothing here changes an answer overnight. Listing and structured data fixes tend to show up first. Being named consistently across a whole set of questions takes longer, because assistants lean on sources that have been steady for a while.
So keep the ten questions fixed and re-run them on the same day each month, logged out, with screenshots. A fixed question set is the only honest way to see movement. Changing the questions when the answer disappoints is how people fool themselves.
One more thing worth knowing
Ranking well on Google does not carry you into the answer on its own. Semrush found the pages ChatGPT cites rank at position 21 or worse in Google almost 90% of the time. It is a different job, done in a different place, and it is why a business can be first on Google and absent from every AI answer in its own town. Source: Semrush AI search traffic study.