A homeowner in Keller with a dead air conditioner used to search, scroll and call the third result. More and more, they ask an assistant instead: who's a good HVAC company near me that can come out today? The assistant answers in a paragraph, names two or three businesses, and the conversation is over before anyone visits a website. If you run a business in Fort Worth, the question worth asking isn't whether this is happening. It's what the assistant says when your name comes up, and whether it's true.
Why you can't just ask it to recommend you
There's no form to fill in and no account to claim. Nobody at an AI company decides that your plumbing business goes on the list. The assistant builds its answer from what it can find and cross-check about you, mostly three places: your own website, your Google Business Profile, and what customers have written in reviews. Directory listings and local news fill in the gaps.
That's the useful part. It means an assistant's answer about you isn't a mystery or a verdict. It's a summary of your public record, and you control more of that record than you probably think. It also means that when the answer is wrong, the fix is almost never in the chatbot. It's upstream. So the honest answer to getting ChatGPT to recommend your business is simple: give it an accurate, specific record to repeat.
An assistant's answer about your business is a summary of your public record. When it's wrong, fix the record, not the chatbot.
How to check what it's saying
This takes about half an hour, and it's worth doing once a quarter.
Ask the questions your customers actually ask. Not "tell me about Smith Plumbing" — that's how you'd ask, not how they do. Ask "who's a reliable plumber in west Fort Worth?", "which roofers in Tarrant County do insurance claims?", "is there a bookkeeper in Burleson who works with contractors?" Then ask about you by name: hours, prices, service area, what you're known for.
Ask more than one assistant, in a fresh session. They draw on different sources and they remember your earlier chats, which flatters the results. A private window or a new conversation gets you closer to what a stranger sees.
Write down every claim, right or wrong. You're looking for four kinds of problem: you're missing entirely, you're described vaguely ("a local business offering services"), you're described wrongly (old hours, a service you dropped, a suburb you don't cover), or a competitor is being described with the specifics you're missing.
Where each wrong answer comes from
Once you have the list, trace each problem back to its source. It usually lands in one of a few places.
Your service area is only on a map. North Texas businesses often cover a dozen towns — Fort Worth, Arlington, Keller, Weatherford, Burleson, Alliance — but the website says "serving the DFW area" and leaves it there. A map embed is a picture to an assistant. If you want to be the answer for Benbrook, the word Benbrook has to be written on your site, ideally on a page that says what you do there.
Your website and your Google profile disagree. Different hours, a different phone number, an old address from before you moved off Camp Bowie. Assistants cross-check, and when your sources contradict each other they either hedge or pick the wrong one. Make every public listing say the same thing, then keep it that way.
Your services live in a PDF or an image. A price sheet scanned as a picture, a menu uploaded as a file, a list of services baked into a banner graphic. If it isn't text on a page, it's close to invisible.
Your reviews don't say what you do. "Great service, would recommend" tells an assistant you're liked. "They replaced our water heater the same afternoon" tells it what you're good at. You can't write your customers' reviews, but you can ask happy ones to mention the job, and you can answer reviews in a way that names the work.
The site doesn't say what kind of business it is. Structured data — a small block of code that states your business type, address, hours and service area in a form machines read directly — is one of the clearest signals you can send. Plenty of local sites have none. We covered where it sits among the other machine-facing fixes in Does your website need an llms.txt?, and the short answer is: well ahead of the fashionable ones.
We run the same check on ourselves
We point our own scanner at our own site, and the last run found something. The business record on our home page — the structured data that tells a machine who THINQ is — wasn’t listing our social profiles, which is one of the ways assistants confirm a business is who it says it is. The profiles were set. A caching fault meant the published page never picked them up, and nothing looked wrong to a person reading it. That’s the lesson in one line: check what a machine actually receives, not what you think you published.
And it’s early — the answers move from week to week, and we’d be lying if we said anyone can pin them down. What doesn’t move is the direction: a vague record gets a vague answer, and a specific one gets repeated.
What this is not
It isn't a trick, and there's no paid shortcut that replaces it. Ads are starting to appear inside some assistants, and we've written about whether a small business should buy them yet, but an ad next to an answer that gets your hours wrong is money spent explaining yourself. The organic answer comes from the record, so the record comes first.
It also isn't a one-time job. Your site changes, your hours change, you add a service. That's one reason we build sites that owners can update themselves, in plain English — the Fort Worth owners we talk to asked for exactly that, and we wrote about what that looks like. A record you can keep current is a record assistants can trust.
Where to start
If you'd rather not spend the half hour yet, start with the part a machine can check. Our free AI visibility scan looks at your site the way an assistant's crawler does — whether it can get in, whether your business details are readable, whether the page says what kind of business you are — and tells you what to fix first, in about twenty seconds.
