How to get your business mentioned in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answers

More people now ask an AI assistant instead of typing a few words into a search box. “Which clinic near Indiranagar is open on Sunday?” “Is there a bakery in Kochi that makes eggless cakes?” “A good accountant for a small shop in Manchester?” ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answer in a paragraph, and they name a few businesses. If yours is not one of them, that customer may never see your website at all.

Nobody can promise that an assistant will recommend you. What you can control is whether it can find accurate facts about your business, understand them, and trust them. This guide covers the steps that matter, in the order we would do them.

How AI assistants decide what to say about you

An assistant’s answer comes from two places. The first is what the model learned during training, which is months old and patchy for small businesses. The second, and the one you can influence quickly, is a live search: many assistants look up the question on the web, read a handful of pages, and summarise them.

Those pages are usually your website, your Google Business Profile, review sites, local directories and news or blog mentions. When they agree with each other, the assistant can describe you with confidence. When they disagree, for example two phone numbers or old opening hours, it may leave you out or repeat the wrong detail.

So the work is not a trick. It is making the facts about your business clear, consistent and easy for a machine to read.

1. Put the plain facts on your own website

Assistants quote sentences. Give them sentences worth quoting. On your home page or an About page, write a short paragraph that a stranger could repeat word for word:

• What you are and where: “Sunrise Dental is a family dental clinic in HSR Layout, Bengaluru.”
• What you offer: the main services or products, by the names customers use.
• Who it is for: families, office workers, wholesale buyers, first-time home buyers.
• The practical details: address, phone, hours, languages spoken, parking, delivery area, how to book.

Write this as visible text, not inside an image or a slider. Many crawlers do not run JavaScript, so if your text only appears after a script loads, they may see an empty page. A quick test: open the page, choose “View page source” in your browser, and search for your phone number. If it is not there, a crawler may not see it either.

Give each main service its own page with a clear heading, such as “Root canal treatment in HSR Layout”, rather than one page listing everything in a single line. A page about one thing is easier to match to one question.

2. Add a real FAQ page

People ask assistants questions, and assistants look for pages that answer them. A good FAQ page is the closest match you can offer. Collect the questions your staff actually hear on the phone and at the counter:

• Are you open on Sundays and public holidays?
• Do you accept insurance, UPI or card payments?
• How much does a first visit or a basic service cost?
• Is there parking? Do you deliver to my area?
• Do I need an appointment?

Answer each in the first sentence, in 40 to 60 words, then add detail if needed. “Yes, we are open on Sundays from 10 am to 2 pm” is quotable. A paragraph that circles the question is not. Only state what is true and current, and avoid claims you cannot back up, such as calling yourself the top clinic in the city.

3. Mark up your pages with structured data

Structured data is a small block of code (JSON-LD, from schema.org) that tells machines exactly what each fact on your page is. For a local business, add:

• LocalBusiness, or a more specific type such as Dentist, Restaurant, Store or RealEstateAgent, with name, address, phone, opening hours, website and links to your social profiles.
• FAQPage on your FAQ page, with each question and answer.
• Service or Product on the pages that describe them, where it fits.

Google now shows FAQ rich results for only a few kinds of sites, but the markup still removes guesswork. Most website builders and WordPress SEO plugins can add it for you; check the result with Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator.

4. Use the same name, address and phone everywhere

Pick one exact version of your business name, address and phone number, and use it on your website, Google Business Profile, Facebook, Instagram, and every directory. In India that may include Justdial, Practo, Zomato, Swiggy, IndiaMART or Sulekha, depending on your trade; elsewhere it may be Yelp, Tripadvisor, Apple Maps or an industry directory.

Small differences add up: “No. 15, 2nd Cross” on one site and “15 Second Cross Road” on another, a landline here and a mobile there. Search each listing once, fix what is wrong, and close duplicates. If you moved or changed your number, update the old listings rather than leaving them behind.

5. Complete your Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile is one of the most widely read sources of facts about a local business, by people and by machines. Gemini and Google’s AI features in Search draw on Google’s own data, and other assistants often read the same public listing. Choose the right primary category, list your services, keep hours current (including holiday hours), add real photos and post updates. Our Google Business Profile checklist walks through every field.

6. Earn reviews, and answer them

Assistants often summarise what reviewers say: “patients mention short waiting times”, “people like the filter coffee”. That summary can only be as good as your reviews. Ask every happy customer, make it easy with a direct link or QR code at the counter, and reply to reviews, including the critical ones, politely and specifically. Never buy reviews or offer something in return for them; it breaks the rules of every major platform and, in many countries including India, consumer protection rules too.

7. Let the right crawlers in

Your robots.txt file tells crawlers what they may read. Some businesses block every AI crawler, and with it, every chance of being quoted. There are two kinds:

• Search crawlers fetch a page to answer a question and usually link back to the source: OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), PerplexityBot, and of course Googlebot and Bingbot. Allow these.
• Training crawlers collect content to train models, such as GPTBot or CCBot. Blocking them is your choice and does not stop the search crawlers above.

Google-Extended is a separate setting for Google’s Gemini models; Google says it does not affect your place in Google Search. Also submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, because several assistants lean on these search indexes.

8. Add an llms.txt file (optional)

llms.txt is a proposed convention: a plain-text file at yoursite.com/llms.txt with a one-paragraph summary of your business and links to your most useful pages. No major assistant has committed to reading it, so treat it as a low-cost extra, not a fix. If you add one, keep it factual and the same as your website.

9. Check what the assistants say today

Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your customers would ask, in their words: “a good physiotherapist near Koramangala”, “where can I buy organic vegetables in Pune”, “what is [your business] known for”. Note whether you are named, whether the facts are right, which sources are cited, and which competitors appear. Repeat every month or two, because answers change.

Baila Lento can check this for you. Its AI visibility check asks AI assistants the questions your customers ask, shows whether your business is named and which sites are cited, and reviews whether your website is easy for AI to read.

A short checklist

1. A plain paragraph on your site saying what you are, where, and for whom.
2. One page per main service, written as visible text.
3. An FAQ page that answers real questions in the first sentence.
4. LocalBusiness and FAQPage structured data, validated.
5. The same name, address and phone on every listing.
6. A complete Google Business Profile with current hours.
7. A steady flow of genuine reviews, with replies.
8. Search crawlers allowed in robots.txt; sitemap submitted.
9. An optional llms.txt file.
10. A monthly look at what the assistants actually say.