SEO PlaysHow to get ChatGPT to recommend your local business
Ask an assistant for the best plumber in a city and it has no local knowledge of its own to offer. It searches, and what comes back is a small and repetitive set: the maps results, two or three review platforms, a local news piece, and somebody's best-of list.
That gives you two ways in. Get into those sources, or become one of them.
The second sounds presumptuous and works because of how the page has to be written. A city list that includes your competitors with real prices, hours and honest verdicts is a useful page, and useful is the whole reason anything gets cited. An advertisement for yourself is not a candidate.
What you get
Your business surfacing when locals ask ChatGPT for a recommendation, by feeding the sources assistants read and becoming one of them.
Steps
- Ask ChatGPT, in a fresh session with web search on: "best [your service] in [your city]" plus two phrasing variants, three runs each.
- Sheet every cited source: local news pieces, best-of listicles, directories, review platforms, maps results.
- Fix your entity data first: complete your Google Business Profile, then make the name, address and phone exactly identical on every listing.
- Get listed in every cited directory and review platform that takes submissions, and fill every field, not just the required ones.
- Build a steady review flow on the specific platforms the answers cited: ask each happy customer for the one platform where you need depth.
- Publish the local list page yourself, on your own site: "The [N] best [service] options in [city]" — honestly including competitors, with concrete details (prices, hours, what each is best at), and yourself described with the same honesty.
- Keep that page current quarterly, with a visible date.
- Re-run the three prompts monthly and log which runs now mention you or cite your page.
How to verify it worked
- A fresh-session run of the prompts names your business, or cites your city page among its sources.
- Search Console shows impressions for "best [service] [city]" query variants.
Why it works
A mismatched name, address or phone number is the quiet failure here. Platforms and maps match listings on those three fields — the NAP triple, name, address and phone — so two spellings of your address make two half-strength businesses, and no amount of review-gathering merges them back into one.
Evidence
Practitioner report, 2026-02: a city directory page built this way was cited by ChatGPT within two weeks of publishing.
Ahrefs, 75,000 brands: mentions across the web correlate 0.664 with ChatGPT visibility against 0.218 for backlinks — for local answers, the mention surface is directories, reviews and local lists.
Last reviewed: 2026-09-01. A play whose evidence stops holding up is rewritten or retired.