How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

The LLMs recommend whoever they feel most confident about. That's my working model, and everything I'm doing on my own sites follows from it.

"You have tons of citations of your work all over the internet, constantly creating content, and all your information matching."

What makes an AI confident in one business over another?

• Citations of real work. Your name and business showing up across many places: your site, directories, podcasts, articles, profiles.
• Consistent content. Not a burst of posts in January and silence after. A steady record.
• Matching facts. Same name, location, services and numbers everywhere. I scored myself 30 out of 100 on an AI visibility audit mostly because my own facts conflicted.
• Answers to real questions. Pages written the way people ask, not the way businesses describe themselves.

What should the content actually say?

Write for the question someone types when they're stressed. When a house burns down or a roof blows off, the first thing a lot of people do is ask ChatGPT or Google something like "how do I make sure I don't get screwed by my insurance company?" For a public adjuster directory I built, the articles answer those exact questions.

Same idea for directory data. Instead of name, hours and description, store answers to specific questions, like whether a provider makes house calls for a senior with an ear infection. Specific beats generic, and almost nobody structures data that way yet.

Does the content have to be read by humans?

Not all of it. For person-based businesses like insurance agents, a lot of the value is making the models see that person as a trusted expert. On my directory, the stack of articles on each business page is there for AI and search to cite. Regular people mostly won't read it. That's fine. It still has to be true, and it still has to come from the real owner. See the 10-80-10 rule.

Do "best X for Y" pages still work?

My theory is yes, for AI search. Google is cracking down on self-promotional listicles, but a page like "best CRMs for insurance agents" with your product listed first can still get surfaced by ChatGPT. A co-builder pointed me to a well-known CRM company that built hundreds of competitor-comparison pages for exactly this reason. Treat that as a theory, not a proven result.

What about the technical side?

1. One domain. Put everything on the root domain so authority isn't split. More on that in subdomain vs. root domain.
2. Own your archive. I copy every newsletter issue to my own site with clean headings, canonical tags, structured data, a sitemap and llms.txt entries.
3. A summary for AI. Your site should state plainly who you are, where you work, and who you serve.

Why start now?

Proof of work is dated. In two or three years, when everybody claims they're good at this, I'll be able to say: look at what I was talking about in 2026. You can't backdate a track record.

And the honest part: nobody controls what a model recommends. I can't promise you a mention and neither can anyone else. You build the foundation that makes you easy to verify, then you earn the exposure.