How to show up in ChatGPT answers

There is no form to fill in and no fee to pay to get into ChatGPT’s answers. ChatGPT names a local business when it can find plain, consistent facts about it: on the business’s own website, in the web index it searches (which leans heavily on Bing), in directories and on review sites. So the work is to let its crawlers read your site, write what you do and where you do it in plain words, make every listing agree with every other, and register with Bing as well as Google. None of that guarantees a mention. All of it makes one more likely.

This guide goes through each of those jobs for an Irish shop, salon, clinic or trade, and is straight about the parts nobody controls.

What ChatGPT reads before it names you

Two different things happen when someone asks ChatGPT for “a good physio in Drumcondra”. The model has a memory from training, which is months old and patchy for small businesses. And when a question needs current facts, ChatGPT search goes out to the web, reads a handful of pages and writes an answer with links to them.

That second part is where you have influence. As we understand it, ChatGPT search draws on Bing’s index along with pages its own crawler fetches, and it treats a business’s own site, review sites and local directories as its sources. If those sources are thin, missing or contradict each other, the answer leaves you out or gets you wrong.

Let the crawlers in

OpenAI runs three crawlers, and plenty of websites block all of them without anyone deciding to. Some hosting companies and content delivery networks offer a switch that blocks AI crawlers, and it can be on without you knowing. Check by opening yourdomain.ie/robots.txt in a browser and reading what is there.

A robots.txt that lets all three in looks like this:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

If your site is on a builder, look for a robots.txt or search engine setting rather than editing the file by hand. If you cannot find one, ask the builder’s support whether AI crawlers are blocked.

Write the facts the way a customer asks the question

ChatGPT quotes plain sentences. It struggles with a price list that only exists as a photo, a menu inside a PDF, and a home page that says “welcome to our website” and little else. Every page should answer, in text, the questions a customer would ask at the counter.

• What exactly you do, service by service, with a price or a “from” price.
• Where you are, with the Eircode, and which areas you travel to if you are a trade. “Electrician covering Swords, Malahide and Portmarnock” beats “serving north Dublin”.
• When you are open, including what happens on bank holidays.
• The questions you get asked every week, written as questions with short answers: “Do you take walk-ins?”, “Is there parking?”, “Do you cut children’s hair?”.

A question and answer page is the most useful single page for this. It gives the model a question that matches what the user typed and an answer it can lift. It is also the page a nervous customer reads before ringing, so it earns its keep twice.

Make every listing agree

ChatGPT cross-checks. If your website says you open at 9am, Google says 9.30am and Facebook still shows the hours from two years ago, the model either hedges or picks one at random. The same goes for a business name spelled one way on the sign, another way on Google and a third way on Instagram, and for a phone number that changed when you got a new handset.

Go through your Google Business Profile, Facebook, Instagram, Golden Pages and any trade directory you are in, and make the name, address, phone number and hours identical to the site. The Google side is covered in our guide to setting up a Google Business Profile in Ireland.

Structured data and llms.txt

Structured data is a block of code behind the page that labels your facts for machines: this is the business name, these are the opening hours, this is the price of a cut. Three types matter for a local business: LocalBusiness (or the more specific type for your trade, such as HairSalon, Dentist or Plumber), FAQPage for the question and answer page, and Service for each thing you sell. Include the address with the Eircode, the phone number, the opening hours and the areas you serve. Test it with Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema.org validator; if those can read it, so can everyone else.

An llms.txt file is a short markdown summary of the site at yourdomain.ie/llms.txt. It is a proposal rather than a standard, and no large AI company has confirmed reading it. It takes half an hour and cannot hurt. We explain what llms.txt is and how to write one separately.

Register with Bing, not only Google

Everyone verifies their site with Google Search Console. Far fewer bother with Bing, and for ChatGPT that is the wrong way round, because ChatGPT search leans on Bing’s index. If Bing has not crawled your new services page, ChatGPT may not know it exists.

Go to Bing Webmaster Tools, sign in, and either verify the site or import it from your Search Console account, which takes a few clicks. Submit your sitemap. Bing also supports IndexNow, which lets your site tell Bing the moment a page changes instead of waiting to be crawled; many hosts and plugins can switch it on.

Get mentioned somewhere other than your own site

A model trusts a business more when other pages mention it. You do not need press coverage. Think about the pages that already exist around a local business:

• Directories: Golden Pages, your county council’s business or tourism listings, trade association member lists.
• Suppliers: a coffee roaster’s stockist page, a paint brand’s approved decorator list, a tyre maker’s dealer locator.
• The community: the GAA club you sponsor, the Tidy Towns page that thanks you, the parish newsletter that went online.
• Local news: a new opening, an award, a charity day.

Each one is a page with your name, your town and what you do on it. Never buy fake mentions or fake reviews. Apart from being wrong, they are exactly the pattern these systems are built to ignore.

The part nobody controls

ChatGPT’s answers change from one day to the next and from one phrasing to the next. It makes things up, and it sometimes recommends a business that closed years ago. Nobody can promise you a mention, and anyone who does is selling something.

What you can do is check. Once a month, ask ChatGPT about your trade in your town and about your business by name, and note what it gets wrong. Then fix the source, which is nearly always your own site or a listing. Watch your analytics for visits arriving from chatgpt.com. When they appear, the work is working.

What we do for clients

AI search readiness is part of Essentials, so every site we build leaves with the groundwork in place: a robots.txt that lets the search crawlers in, structured data for the business, its services and its questions and answers, an llms.txt file generated from the same data as the pages, and the site verified in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. The question and answer content comes from what the owner actually gets asked, not a generic list.

On Complete we go a step further and connect the booking calendar to AI assistants, so a customer can ask ChatGPT or Claude to book an appointment and the assistant makes the booking. How that works is on the AI assistants page.

We do not promise placement in anyone’s answers, because nobody can. We do the work above and the monthly report shows what came of it. The wider picture is on the AI search page.