The Short Answer
Getting recommended by ChatGPT means being visible in the sources it actually retrieves from: Bing search, Yelp, your Google Business Profile, and Bing Places. The playbook is concrete: verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit through IndexNow, add schema markup, publish pages that answer real customer questions directly, keep your business data identical across every listing, and earn detailed written reviews. Then ask the assistants your customers’ questions every month and log what they say, because that is the only honest way to measure progress.
ChatGPT search retrieves through Bing, not Google. Roughly 87 percent of its citations match the Bing top ten for the same query. Most local business sites are barely present in Bing because nobody ever set it up: the site got submitted to Google Search Console years ago and Bing was ignored. If Bing cannot see you, ChatGPT effectively cannot see you, no matter how well you rank on Google.
This is the cheapest fix on the list and the one most businesses skip.
AI systems recommend businesses whose pages read like answers. A page titled after the literal question a customer asks, with a direct answer in the first two sentences, real numbers, and an FAQ section, gives an assistant something it can quote. A page of vague marketing copy gives it nothing. Studies in 2026 consistently show pages with FAQ and schema markup getting cited substantially more often.
Schema markup is the machine-readable layer underneath: structured data telling systems your business name, services, service area, hours, and which parts of a page are questions and answers. It is invisible to visitors and heavily used by retrieval systems. Most Michigan small business sites have none.
One thing to skip: llms.txt. It costs nothing to add, we have one ourselves, but almost no AI crawler reads it today. Treat it as a checkbox, not a strategy, and be suspicious of anyone selling it as one.
When someone asks ChatGPT for a plumber in Portage, it triangulates across your Google Business Profile, Yelp, and Bing Places. As of 2026, ChatGPT licenses Yelp review data directly, which makes Yelp matter again even if it stopped sending you customers years ago. If your name, address, phone number, categories, and hours disagree across those sources, the systems read that inconsistency as low confidence and recommend someone cleaner.
Review text quality matters more than star averages alone. A review that says "great service" tells an AI almost nothing. A review that says the crew replaced a furnace in one day, showed up when promised, and came in at the quoted price gives the system specific, quotable evidence about what you do and where. Ask happy customers to mention the actual service and town in their review. You cannot script reviews, but you can ask better questions when you request them.
Nobody controls what ChatGPT says, so the only honest measurement is a logged check. Once a month, ask the assistants the questions your customers ask: best roofer near me, HVAC repair in Kalamazoo, whatever your money queries are. Record the date, the exact question, and who got named. Over a few months you will see yourself appear, hold, or slip, and you will know which changes moved the needle.
Local AI answers are still volatile in 2026, and that is the opportunity. Volatile means winnable: the businesses that fix their plumbing now are getting cited while their competitors have not started. We ran this exact playbook on Dekree, a software product we built and market ourselves, and ChatGPT and Gemini were both citing it within a month of shipping the work. That timeline is realistic when the inputs are actually fixed.
We will run a free AI visibility baseline: what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity say about your business today, what they say about your competitors, and the specific gaps in your indexing, schema, and listings. First agency in the Kalamazoo market doing this work, with logged results from our own product as proof.
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