How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI (Australia, 2026)

How do AI assistants actually pick which businesses to name?

When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini “who’s a good pest controller on the Gold Coast?”, the assistant does two things. It draws on what it already knows from training data, and — increasingly — it runs a live web search and reads the top results before answering. Either way, it names businesses whose details it can verify across multiple sources and whose pages give it clean, quotable facts: what you do, where you work, what you charge, why you’re trusted.

The practical consequence: getting recommended is not one trick. It is seven unglamorous jobs done consistently. Here they are, in the order that pays off fastest.

Step 1 — Is your Google Business Profile actually complete?

Your GBP is the single most-corroborated source about your business, and it feeds both Google’s AI and (indirectly) everyone else’s. Complete means: correct primary category, every service listed with a description, opening hours, service areas, photos of real jobs (not stock), and a phone number that matches your website exactly. Post to it occasionally — a dormant profile reads as a possibly-closed business.

Step 2 — Are reviews arriving steadily, and do you reply?

Assistants asked to recommend lean hard on third-party trust signals, and Google reviews are the biggest for local services. Three habits beat any hack: ask every happy customer (a QR code or SMS link makes it frictionless), keep them coming steadily rather than in bursts, and reply to all of them — replies are content AI can read, and they show the business is alive. A 4.7 with recent activity beats a 5.0 that went quiet a year ago.

Step 3 — Can a machine read your website, or just a human?

This is where most Australian small-business sites fail. An AI reading your site needs:

• Answer-first pages. The direct answer to the page’s question in the first screen — not after 400 words of scene-setting. If your pricing page doesn’t state prices, an AI cannot recommend you on price.
• Question-form headings. Structure sections as the questions customers actually ask (“How much does gutter cleaning cost?”), each answerable standalone — assistants retrieve passages, not whole pages.
• Structured data (JSON-LD). At minimum LocalBusiness (with your ABN, service area and opening hours), Service for each offering, and FAQPage for your Q&As. This is the difference between an AI parsing your prose and being handed the facts.
• Tables for anything comparative. Prices, inclusions, options — AI extracts HTML tables almost verbatim.
• Visible dates and a named author. Undated, anonymous pages are low-confidence sources. “Updated July 2026, by [owner]” is a trust signal machines act on.
• Speed. Retrieval crawlers time-box fetches; a page that takes eight seconds on mobile may simply never be read.

Step 4 — Are AI crawlers allowed in, and is there an llms.txt?

Check your robots.txt: many sites block AI crawlers by accident (often via a CDN’s “block AI bots” toggle) and vanish from assistants entirely. The crawlers that matter in 2026: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, Google-Extended (Gemini training) and Bingbot. Then add an llms.txt — a plain-text file at your site root that hands assistants your canonical facts: what you do, where, pricing, contact. It costs an hour and removes every excuse an AI has to get your details wrong.

Step 5 — Why does Bing suddenly matter again?

Because ChatGPT Search and Microsoft Copilot answer from Bing’s index. A site missing from Bing is invisible to the most-used AI assistant on Earth no matter how well it ranks on Google. The fix takes twenty minutes: verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools (you can import straight from Google Search Console), submit your sitemap, and use IndexNow to ping Bing whenever you publish — recrawls follow within hours instead of weeks.

Step 6 — Do your details agree everywhere on the web?

Assistants corroborate before they recommend. If your website says “Smith & Sons Plumbing, 0400 111 222” and a directory says “Smith and Sons Plumbing Pty Ltd, (07) 5555 1234”, you look like two uncertain businesses instead of one trustworthy one. Pick one canonical name, address and phone format and enforce it across: Google Business Profile, Facebook/Instagram, Localsearch, Yellow Pages, TrueLocal, industry directories (hipages, Oneflare, your trade association) and every citation you can edit. Each consistent, independent mention is a vote.

Step 7 — Is your geography explicit, or assumed?

AI retrieval filters hard on location. “Plumber” is a world of competitors; “emergency plumber in Toowong, Brisbane” is a shortlist. Put your suburb, city and “Australia” in page titles, headings and your structured data’s areaServed. If you genuinely service multiple areas, give each real service area its own page with substance specific to it — jobs done there, travel times, local landmarks. Thin copy-paste suburb pages get ignored (or worse, read as spam).

How do I know if it’s working?

Test it the way a customer would, monthly. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity the questions that should surface you: “best [trade] in [suburb]”, “who should I call for [service] in [city]”, “is [your business name] any good?”. Record whether you’re mentioned, whether you’re cited as a link, and who appears instead. In GA4, watch for referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com — it is small today, but it converts unusually well because the assistant has already pre-sold the recommendation.

Can I do this myself, or should I pay someone?

Honestly: everything above is DIY-able. The Google Business Profile and reviews cost only discipline; Bing verification is twenty minutes; llms.txt is an hour with a template. The parts most owners don’t do themselves are the structural website work — schema, answer-first rewrites, question-form pages, speed — and the monthly consistency. That is the gap done-for-you services fill: Propeller includes all of it (site, schema, llms.txt, Bing submission, content updates) in its Growth plan at $199/month, with the website itself built free. Whether you DIY or delegate, the businesses that do this work in 2026 are the ones AI will still be recommending in 2028.

Frequently asked questions

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