How to Show Up in ChatGPT and AI Overviews When You're a Local Business

Quick take

When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI who to hire nearby, the answer leans on two things: pages the assistant can read, and what other sites say about you. Most local businesses I check pass the first and come up short on the second.

Here is roughly how that answer gets built:

The order I work in is the same every time. Let the right bots in. Make your facts agree everywhere. Ask the questions your buyers ask and write down what comes back. Then get named on the sites those answers already cite. This post walks through each step, the way I run it in my AI answer audit, at a size you can do yourself.

Ranking in ChatGPT isn’t one thing

“Showing up” covers two very different questions.

The first is a buyer who types your name. In my AI answers field report, assistants named the business 90.2% of the time when the buyer asked about it by name (751 of 833 answers). That part mostly works.

The second is a buyer who describes a problem and names nobody. “Who can fix a leaking water heater in Spokane this week?” On questions like that, the business was named 2.6% of the time (16 of 623 answers). That’s where new customers come from, and it’s the number that stays low.

Everything below is aimed at the second number.

Step 1: let the right bots in

OpenAI uses its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, to surface websites in ChatGPT search. OpenAI says sites that opt out of it won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers.

Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode don’t have a separate crawler. Google says a page needs to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, and that there are no additional technical requirements. If you show up in normal Google results with a description under your link, you’re eligible.

Blocking the training bots doesn’t change either of those. OpenAI sets GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot independently. Google says Google-Extended doesn’t affect inclusion in Google Search.

So the check is short. Is OAI-SearchBot allowed in your robots.txt? Is Googlebot? Is a firewall or a CDN setting turning either away? The AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt for the bots in my AI crawler directory, and I wrote up the full manual check for the parts a robots.txt reader can’t see.

For most businesses this comes back clean. In the field report, all 530 crawler fetches across 9 sites returned a 200. Run it anyway. When it isn’t clean, fix it first. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers.

Step 2: make your facts agree everywhere

An assistant that finds two sets of hours has to pick one. In the shorter snapshot checks behind my field report, 4 of 4 businesses had facts that disagreed between their own website and their listings, at least 6 facts each.

The method is a spreadsheet.

1. Rows: business name, address, phone, hours, service area, services, prices if you publish them, license number, year founded.
2. Columns: your website, your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, and every industry directory you’re listed on.
3. Fill every cell. Copy what each one says today, word for word.
4. Fix the source. Every row that disagrees is a fix. Correct each listing that’s wrong, then your site.

My free check log and ledger has this sheet built, along with the questions in step 3.

The Business Profile deserves extra care. Google says its local results weigh relevance, distance and prominence, and that prominence includes how many websites link to you and how many reviews you have. That’s Google’s local pack, not the AI answer. But in my field report, the domains cited in answers for the most businesses I checked were facebook.com, google.com, linkedin.com, reddit.com, bbb.org, yelp.com, youtube.com. Your profile and your listings are some of the pages being read.

Step 3: ask the questions your buyers ask

Write ten questions. A few should include your name: “Is [business] any good?” or “What are [business]‘s hours?” Most shouldn’t. “Who’s the best [service] in [city]?” “Who can fix [problem] near [neighborhood] this week?” “How much does [service] cost in [city]?” Write at least one the way a customer would describe the problem to a friend, with no trade words.

Then ask them.

1. Use a clean session. A private window, logged out where the assistant allows it. Your own chat history can leak into the answer.
2. Ask each question three times. The same question gets different answers from run to run, and one answer proves very little.
3. Check ChatGPT and Google first. On Google, AI Overviews appear on a normal search, and AI Mode is its own tab.
4. Log three things per run: who got named, which facts about you were wrong, and which sites the answer cited.

This is the core of my audit at a smaller size. The full version, which is the first thing I ship in paid work, runs 30 questions on 5 assistants, 3 runs each, with the question list locked before the first run so a re-test compares like with like. Ten questions on two assistants will still show you the pattern.

Step 4: get named where the answers already look

Your log from step 3 has a list of sites in it. Those are the sources the assistant trusts for your kind of business in your town: a directory, a review site, a local “best of” article, a forum thread, a trade association listing. That list is your work plan.

Go down it in order of how often each site was cited.

1. Listings you can claim: claim them, fill every field, and match the facts from step 2.
2. Review sites: ask happy customers to review you on the platforms that keep showing up. In my snapshot checks, 4 of 4 businesses had fewer Google reviews than the median competitor the answers named instead. That’s a small sample and it doesn’t prove reviews cause naming, but it lines up with what the answers cite.
3. Articles and roundups: contact the writer with something worth adding, like a local price guide or a fact they got wrong.
4. Local organizations: chambers, trade groups and sponsors that list their members.

This step is slow. It’s also the one that moved naming in my audits. When I audited my own site, the engines could read every page and still named me on almost no hiring questions. Directories and roundups held the spots, and I had no presence on them. I wrote that up in six AI search audits.

Step 5: write the page the answer wants to quote

For each service you want to be named for, have one page that answers the buyer’s question in its first two sentences: what the service is, where you do it, what drives the price, and how soon you can start. Put a date and your name on it. Keep the facts identical to your listings.

In one audit I ran, the pages that won the comparison questions all shared a format: a verdict at the top, a comparison table, a recent date and a named author. The business had no page in that format.

Skip the shortcuts. Google says you don’t need AI text files, markup or special schema to appear in its AI features. An llms.txt file won’t get you named on its own either.

Where to start today

Run the free AI Visibility Check on your site for a quick read of what a tool can see from the outside. Then do steps 2 and 3 by hand this week. A tool can’t tell you what the answers say about you.

To have me look first, start with the free AI Answer Snapshot on my AI answer audit page: 10 questions on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, back within 48 hours.

Frequently asked questions

See how I check what AI assistants tell people about a business.