AI visibility: how to get ChatGPT to recommend your business

ChatGPT recommends businesses it can clearly understand and trust: your offer has to be described clearly, your business data has to be identical everywhere, and your name has to be mentioned on credible sites. For questions like "Which agency in Dresden …?", ChatGPT increasingly combines its trained knowledge with a live web search. Businesses that are easy to find and easy to quote there have the best chance of being named, there is no guarantee, though.

In this article we explain how AI assistants select businesses, what you can do in practice and how to measure whether it works.

#What does AI visibility mean?

AI visibility describes how often and how accurately your business appears in answers from AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini or the AI Overviews in Google Search. Practitioners also call it GEO (generative engine optimisation) or AEO (answer engine optimisation).

The difference from classic search: instead of ten blue links, the user gets a ready-made answer, often with two or three concrete recommendations and sources. If you don't appear there, you are simply not considered in that moment.

#How does ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?

No provider fully discloses its selection criteria. But the way these systems work points to two sources of knowledge:

#1. Training data: what the model "knows"

Large language models are trained on large amounts of publicly available text. If your business is mentioned frequently and consistently in such texts in connection with a topic, say "web design Dresden", the likelihood rises that the model knows this connection. That knowledge has a cut-off date, though, and only changes with new model versions.

#2. Live web search: what the model finds right now

For current or local questions, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google search the web in real time and summarise the pages they find. According to OpenAI, ChatGPT uses its own crawlers as well as third-party search providers for this. What counts here is what is on your website and about your business online today and how easily it can be read and quoted.

#What you can do: 7 levers for AI visibility

#1. Answer your customers' questions directly

AI systems look for passages that answer a question clearly. So start service pages and articles with a direct answer in one or two sentences, details follow afterwards. Phrase headings as real questions: "What does … cost?", "How long does … take?", "Who is … for?". A good example is our article What does a professional website cost in 2026?.

#2. Say clearly who you are, what you do and where

It sounds trivial, yet it is missing on many websites. Your home page and about page should state in one sentence: company name, service, target group and location. Example: "WebDrift is a digital agency from Dresden that builds websites, AI automation and visibility for small and mid-sized businesses."

#3. Keep your business data identical everywhere

Name, address, phone number, opening hours and services should be identical on your website, in your Google Business Profile, on Bing Places, in business directories and on social media profiles. Contradictions make it hard for machines to trust you.

#4. Use structured data

With Schema.org markup you describe content in a machine-readable way, for example Organization or LocalBusiness for your company, Service for services, FAQPage for frequently asked questions and Article for blog posts. Structured data does not guarantee a mention, but it makes correct understanding easier.

#5. Earn mentions on other sites

AI assistants like to base recommendations on several independent sources: industry portals, local media, association pages, partner sites, expert articles and review platforms. Genuine customer reviews in your Google Business Profile matter especially for local queries. Never buy reviews: it is not permitted and damages trust.

#6. Make your website technically accessible

• Important content is available as text in the HTML, not only in images, PDFs or scripts that load later.
• The site loads fast and works flawlessly on mobile.
• Your robots.txt does not lock out crawlers by accident. OpenAI, for example, distinguishes between OAI-SearchBot (search) and GPTBot (training), so you can opt out of training and still allow search (OpenAI documentation).
• An XML sitemap is submitted to Google and Bing.

#7. Show expertise with evidence

Describe your way of working, your team and real projects concretely. Cite sources when you use numbers, and keep content up to date. Shallow mass-produced text helps neither on Google nor with AI assistants.

#Checklist: is your business ready for AI recommendations?

• Your home page states in one sentence: who, what, for whom, where.
• Every important service has its own page with a direct answer at the top.
• Frequent customer questions are answered on the website with FAQ markup.
• Name, address and phone number are identical everywhere.
• Google Business Profile and Bing Places are fully maintained.
• Structured data for organisation, services and FAQ is in place.
• robots.txt allows the search crawlers of Google, Bing, OpenAI and Perplexity.
• The website loads fast and is easy to use on mobile.
• Your business is mentioned on at least a few independent, reputable sites.
• You regularly test what AI assistants say about your business.

#How to measure your AI visibility

There is no tool (yet) that measures AI visibility as precisely as Google rankings. In practice, this works:

1. Prompt test: Every month, ask the same ten to twenty questions your customers would ask in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Google Search. Note whether and how your business is named and which sources are cited.
2. Check referrers: In your web analytics, look for visits from domains such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai or copilot.microsoft.com. ChatGPT also appends the parameter utm_source=chatgpt.com to many links.
3. Ask new enquiries: Ask new customers how they found you. "ChatGPT recommended you" is an increasingly common answer.

#Conclusion: AI visibility is good communication for people and machines

If you say clearly what you offer, answer questions honestly, show the same data everywhere and are mentioned by others, you make it easy for people and AI systems to recommend you. The good news: most of this also improves your Google rankings and your enquiry rate.

Want to know how visible your business is in AI answers today? Our AI visibility page shows how we approach it. For classic search engine optimisation, see growth & visibility or start your project right away.

#Sources and further documentation

• OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ChatGPT-User)
• OpenAI: ChatGPT search, help article
• Google Search Central: AI features and your website
• Google Search Central: Introduction to structured data