How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews

The first answer is no longer a list of links

Ask ChatGPT for the best physio in Newtown and you get a short answer, maybe three names, and a line about why. Ask Google a question and an AI Overview often appears before the ten blue links. Neither is showing your website first — they are showing a summary of what the internet says about you.

That changes the job. Ranking on page one used to be enough. Now you need to be described clearly and consistently enough that a language model can repeat it without guessing. For a local business, this is the biggest shift in discovery since Google Maps.

How AI decides who to recommend

AI answers are built from sources the model already trusts: your website, your Google Business Profile, business directories, reviews, news mentions, council and association listings, and forum discussions. When several of those agree, the model states you confidently. When they conflict — an old address on one directory, a phone number that changed — it hedges, or picks someone else.

There is no secret tag to add. There is a set of signals that make you easy to describe accurately.

What actually moves the needle

• One consistent identity. Same business name, address and phone everywhere: your site footer, Google, Bing, Facebook, directories. Inconsistency is the single most common reason a business gets skipped.
• Plain-text facts on your site. Services, suburbs you serve, prices or ranges, opening hours, who works there. If it only exists in an image or a JavaScript widget, an AI crawler may never read it.
• Structured data. LocalBusiness or Organization schema with your address, area served and opening hours. It is machine-readable confirmation of what your page claims.
• Real reviews. Reviews are the strongest third-party evidence that you do what you say. Recent ones matter more than a large old pile.
• Independent mentions. A local news story, a supplier page, an industry association listing, a community group post. These are the citations models lean on.
• Pages that answer real questions. "How much does a blocked drain cost in Brisbane?" beats a page called "Services".

An Australian reality check

BrightLocal's 2025 research found only 35% of small businesses have claimed a Google Business Profile. That is a strange gap: the profile is free, and Google's own data says businesses with a complete one are 70% more likely to be visited. If two-thirds of your competitors have not done the most basic step, the bar to be the business AI names is lower than it looks.

What to do this week

Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. Add LocalBusiness schema to your site. Make one page per service and one per suburb. Ask ten happy customers for a review. Then re-run the scorecard above in a month and watch which items moved.

Getting named by AI is not a trick. It is the same work good local SEO has always rewarded — done with more precision about who you are and where you work.