How to get my business to show up in ChatGPT

There is no form to submit and no ad to buy that puts your business into ChatGPT's answers. When a buyer asks "what is a good X for Y", the assistant writes its answer from what it has read and, more and more, from pages it searches for in the moment. Your job is to make sure the right pages exist and say the same clear thing about you.

Step 1: measure before you change anything

Write down five to ten questions a real customer would ask without naming you: "best bookkeeping service for a small restaurant", "where can I rent a car without a credit card in Phoenix". Ask each one in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, and note two things per answer: are you named, and which sites does the answer cite or lean on.

Expect a low number at first, even if you rank well on Google. Monid, a young company, published exactly this test on itself: it was named in 0 of 24 answers across four AI search tools. Being new is normal. Not measuring is the mistake.

Step 2: say what you are, in one sentence, everywhere

Assistants repeat what they see most consistently. Pick one plain sentence: what you are, for whom, where. Use it on your home page, your About page, your social bios and every directory listing. If your name is shared with other products, say plainly which one you are, so the assistant does not mix you up with them.

Step 3: get onto the pages the answers already cite

Step 1 told you which sites the assistants lean on for your category: often a directory, a review site, a "best X in Y" list, or a forum thread. Those are your targets. Claim or create your listing on each, with the same sentence and correct details. One listing on a site the answers actually cite is worth more than twenty on sites they never read.

Step 4: publish pages that answer the question directly

Write a page for each question you want to be named for, and put the answer in the first two sentences. Add specifics an assistant can quote: what you offer, who it is for, where, and real numbers you can stand behind. Honest comparison pages ("you vs the usual alternative") help, as long as they are fair.

Step 5: make sure the assistants can read your site

Check that your robots.txt does not block the crawlers that AI search tools use, that your important pages are in your sitemap, and that the text is in the page itself, not only inside images or scripts.

Step 6: re-measure on a schedule

Run the same questions every couple of weeks. Answers move slowly and vary from day to day, so look at the trend over the full set, not one answer.

Where Zavi fits

Zavi's GEO agent does this loop for you: it tracks whether you are named for your category questions in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, shows which sites the answers cite, points you at the one listing worth getting, and drafts the pages that answer the questions. You approve what gets published. The free growth score includes a one-question version of this check, so you can see where you stand in two minutes.