How to get your business recommended by AI (2026)

October 3, 2026 · 7 min read · Punk Peach

More buyers now ask AI which business to choose. If your competitors get named and you don't, you lose customers you never knew you had. Here's how these assistants pick businesses, and what you can do about it.

Can you pay to be recommended?

Not inside the answer. OpenAI says ChatGPT's answers stay independent of ads, and Google says there's no way to pay for a better local ranking. What you can buy are labelled ads shown beside or below the answer: ChatGPT ads (open to US advertisers since 2026), ads in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode through normal Google Ads campaigns, and ads in Copilot through Microsoft Advertising. Perplexity stopped selling ads. Most of these AI placements aren't offered in the UAE yet.

How AI assistants choose businesses

When someone asks for the best option in their city, the assistant searches the web, reads a set of pages and summarises them. A business gets named when three things are true:

1. The assistant can read your site. Google says its AI answers have no special requirements: the page just needs to be indexed and allowed to show a snippet. ChatGPT only shows sites that let its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, in.
2. Your site states the facts plainly: who you are, what you sell, where, for whom, and how to reach you.
3. Other trusted sites mention you: reviews, directories, "best of" lists, local press and forums.

The checklist

1. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and make sure it doesn't block OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot, Bingbot, PerplexityBot or Claude-SearchBot. Blocking GPTBot or Google-Extended only opts you out of AI training, not answers.
2. Make sure your key pages aren't set to noindex or nosnippet.
3. Add Organization or LocalBusiness structured data to your home page, with your name, address, phone and links to your profiles (sameAs).
4. Write a plain-facts About page: what you do, where, since when, for whom.
5. Add a FAQ with the questions buyers actually ask, answered in two or three direct sentences.
6. Complete your Google Business Profile and Bing Places listing, and keep your name, address and phone identical everywhere.
7. Get listed on the directories and review sites your buyers use, and ask every real customer for a review. Never buy reviews or offer rewards for them: the FTC bans fake and paid-for-sentiment reviews.
8. Pitch the "best of" lists, local news and industry blogs that AI assistants already cite for your topic.
9. Ask the assistants the same buyer questions every month and note who they name and which sites they cite.

Google rankings and AI answers go together

Google's AI answers draw on Google's own index, and its advice for them is ordinary good SEO. Other assistants search the web too. So the work that gets you onto page one of Google is most of the work that gets you into AI answers.