How to get your business mentioned by ChatGPT.

01Can you submit your business to ChatGPT?

You cannot submit a business to ChatGPT, because no submission form, directory or paid listing exists. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Copilot assemble each answer from pages they can find on the open web and from their search partners. Your job is to make your business easy for those systems to find and confirm.

This matters more each quarter. OpenAI said at DevDay in September 2026 that its products reach a collective 1.2 billion weekly users¹, a figure that covers all of its products together. Closer to home, InternetNZ's Internet Insights research, surveying 1,003 New Zealand adults in late 2025, found 53% had used a text-based AI chatbot in the past year and 55% had used AI inside a search engine².

The useful question is what those assistants read when someone asks for a business like yours. The guide to answer engine optimisation covers the theory. This page is the practical version, in the order I would do it for a small business.

02Where does ChatGPT get its information about businesses?

When ChatGPT searches the web, it rewrites the question into targeted queries, sends them to partner search providers including Microsoft Bing, and reads the pages that come back. It then writes an answer and cites some of those pages. Your website, your Google and Bing listings, directories, reviews and press mentions are all raw material for that answer.

OpenAI's help page on ChatGPT search says it sends rewritten queries to search partners, names Microsoft among them, and may pass a general location based on your IP address³. That last detail means a "near me" prompt from Hamilton gets treated as a Hamilton search.

Ranking on Google helps, but it does not decide who gets named. Ahrefs' own analysis of 15,000 prompts in 2025 found only 12% of URLs cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt, and 8% for ChatGPT alone, compared with 28.6% for Perplexity⁴. Ahrefs sells SEO tools, so treat it as one vendor's measurement, but the direction is consistent across its studies: the assistants read widely, and what other sites say about you counts.

The strongest signal Ahrefs has found is being talked about. In its 2025 study of 75,000 brands, branded web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks, and 26% of brands had no AI Overview mentions at all⁵. Correlation does not prove cause. It does tell you where to spend your hours.

03Step 1: Check what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Copilot say about you

Start by asking the assistants the questions your customers ask, and write down what comes back. Fifteen minutes with eight prompts across four assistants gives you a baseline: whether you are named, whether the details are right, which competitors appear, and which websites the assistants cite. Every later step is measured against this list.

Write prompts the way a customer would type them, including the town or suburb. For a plumbing firm in Christchurch, that might look like this:

• "Who is a good plumber in Christchurch for a blocked drain?"
• "Recommend a plumber in Riccarton who does hot water cylinders."
• "What do people say about [your business name]?"
• "[Your business name] vs [main competitor]: which is better for a bathroom renovation?"
• "Is [your business name] open on Saturdays, and where are they based?"

Then run each prompt in every assistant. They behave differently, so test all four.

Keep the results in a spreadsheet with the date. The column that teaches you the most is the list of cited sites. If every answer about electricians in your city cites the same two directories and one local news story, those are the pages you need to be on.

04Step 2: Make sure the assistants can reach your website

An assistant can only cite pages its crawler is allowed to read. Check your robots.txt file for rules that block AI search crawlers, confirm your site appears in Bing as well as Google, and make sure your main pages load as plain text without needing a login or heavy script. These checks take under an hour.

OpenAI runs separate crawlers for separate jobs. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, while GPTBot relates to model training and is controlled separately⁶. Some website builders and security plugins block AI bots by default, so open yourdomain.co.nz/robots.txt and look for OAI-SearchBot, or a blanket rule that blocks every bot.

Bing matters more than its market share suggests. Statcounter's September 2026 data gives Bing 7.71% of New Zealand search, against 89.02% for Google⁷, yet Bing feeds Copilot and is a named search partner for ChatGPT. Register the site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, and claim a Bing Places listing. Most small businesses have never done either.

05Step 3: Write pages an assistant can quote

Assistants quote pages that state facts plainly, near the top, in sentences that make sense on their own. Give each service its own page that says what you do, where, for whom, and roughly what it costs. Answer the questions customers ask on the phone in short sections, and add sources and specifics wherever you can.

The research backs specifics over polish. The GEO study by Aggarwal and colleagues, published at KDD 2024 and tested on 10,000 queries, found that methods such as adding statistics, quotations and cited sources lifted a source's visibility in generative engine answers by up to 40%⁸. It is a lab benchmark, so read it as direction, but keyword stuffing did nothing in the same tests.

For a small business, the practical rewrite looks like this:

1. Open each service page with a two-sentence answer: the service, the area you cover, and who it suits.
2. State the facts an assistant will be asked for: suburbs served, hours, licences or registrations, price ranges, typical turnaround.
3. Add a short questions section using the exact questions from your inbox and phone calls.
4. Name real things: the brands you install, the council you deal with, the certification body you are registered with.
5. Add LocalBusiness structured data so your name, address and hours are machine readable. Google says no special markup is needed for its AI features beyond core SEO⁹, so treat schema as housekeeping that keeps your details tidy.

The AEO checklist has the full list, ranked by effort.

06Step 4: Earn mentions on sites the assistants already cite

Assistants name businesses that other websites talk about. Use the cited sources from Step 1 as your target list: the directories, local news sites, industry associations, comparison articles and video channels that keep appearing. Getting your business accurately listed or mentioned on those pages is the highest-return work in this guide for most local firms.

Video is worth a look. Ahrefs' later study of 75,000 brands found YouTube mentions had the strongest correlation with brand visibility across ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews, at about 0.737¹⁰, and its March 2026 analysis found YouTube was the most-cited domain in AI Overviews, at 5.6% of all citations¹¹. A plumber filming two-minute answers to common questions on a phone is building exactly that kind of footprint.

Places to look for an NZ business, depending on your trade:

• Your industry or trade association's member directory, with a full profile.
• Local directories such as NZ Business Directory, Yellow and Neighbourly, plus any marketplace like Builderscrack that shows up in your test answers.
• Local news and community sites, through sponsorships, events or a useful comment on a local story.
• Supplier and partner pages that list approved installers or stockists.
• "Best of" roundups for your city that the assistants already cite. Ask to be considered, with facts the writer can check.

Accuracy beats volume here. One current listing on a site the assistants read is worth more than twenty on directories nobody visits.

07Step 5: Keep your business details identical everywhere

Assistants cross-check facts across sources, and conflicting details make them hesitant to name you. Use one exact version of your business name, address, phone number and hours on your website, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Facebook and every directory. Update all of them the same week whenever something changes, such as a move or new hours.

This is called NAP consistency, and it is how an assistant decides that the "Smith Electrical" in a directory and the "Smith Electrical Ltd" on your site are the same entity. Search your own business name in each assistant and fix any outdated details at the source page. Old addresses and closed branches are the errors to look for first.

Keep a simple master record (a single document with the exact details) and copy from it every time. If you trade under a name that differs from the company register, say so on your About page in one plain sentence.

08Step 6: Build a steady flow of recent reviews

People who get a business recommendation from an AI assistant tend to check it against reviews, and the assistants read those reviews too. A steady flow of recent, specific reviews on Google and the platforms your industry uses gives both the assistant and the customer something to confirm. Ask every happy customer, every week.

The local data here is American, so treat it as direction for New Zealand. BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey of 1,002 US adults found 45% had used ChatGPT or other AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier, and 74% look for reviews written in the last three months¹². Its follow-up on 455 of those AI users found 88% check the sources the AI cites, with ChatGPT used by 31% and Google AI Mode by 23% for local recommendations¹³.

So the recommendation is only half the job. When the customer clicks through, they need to land on a profile with recent reviews that mention the job they want done. Ask for reviews by text message straight after the work is finished, include the direct link, and reply to every review, good or bad, within a few days.

09How long does it take, and how do you track progress?

Technical fixes such as unblocking a crawler or claiming a Bing listing can show up within weeks. Anything that depends on other sites mentioning you takes months. Track it by re-running your Step 1 prompts on the first working day of each month and logging whether you are named, what is said and which sources are cited.

Four things to watch in that monthly log:

• Mention rate: of your prompts, how many name you in each assistant.
• Accuracy: whether the hours, location and services quoted are right.
• Cited sources: whether your own pages and new listings start appearing as citations.
• Referral visits: in Google Analytics, check traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and copilot.microsoft.com.

Answers vary between runs, so look for a trend across two or three months before deciding anything works. If you want to see how this differs from classic search work, the comparison of AEO, SEO and GEO lays out what each one measures, and the guide to SEO for small business in NZ covers the Google side.

10Where Flow AI fits

Flow AI is an AI marketing transformation practice: the strategy, the systems and the agents that run a marketing function, engineered end to end. For AI search, that means the test prompts, listing fixes, page rewrites and monthly tracking above, installed as a system on your own site and accounts. The AI search sprint describes exactly what gets installed.

It starts with a written scope that names the first system to install, which for many local businesses is this one. You can also do every step here yourself: nothing in this guide needs a paid tool.

11The short version

ChatGPT has no sign-up form. It and the other assistants search the web and name the businesses they can confirm. Check what they say about you today, let their crawlers in, write pages that state plain facts, and get listed accurately on the sites they already cite.

Then keep your details identical everywhere, collect recent reviews every week, and re-run your prompts monthly. Most of this is an afternoon of setup and a small weekly habit.

To find out which of these steps your business needs first, talk to Amber.