How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Gemini
Someone is going to ask ChatGPT to recommend a business like yours this week. The question is whether it names you or your competitor.
This is a different game than ranking on Google, and most businesses are still only playing the old one.
AI search doesn't rank pages. It synthesizes an answer.
Google gives someone ten blue links and lets them decide. An AI model gives someone one answer, built by pulling together whatever sources it trusts most on the topic. If your business isn't part of what it's pulling from, you don't show up as option four on a list, you don't show up at all.
That changes what "being found" actually requires.
Clarity beats keyword density
AI models are not counting how many times you repeated your target keyword. They're trying to understand what you actually do, who it's for, and whether your content answers the question cleanly enough to quote or summarize.
A page stuffed with vague, keyword-heavy language is harder for a model to confidently extract an answer from than a page that states things plainly. If a human would find your homepage confusing, assume the model does too.
Structure your content the way you'd explain it out loud
The clearest test: could this page be read aloud and still make complete sense as an answer to someone's question? Short, direct sentences. Clear headers that state what the section covers. Answers that don't require scrolling through three paragraphs of preamble to find the actual point.
This is the same principle behind good sales copy, get to the point, remove the throat-clearing, say the specific thing. It turns out that's also exactly what makes content easy for a language model to lift and repeat accurately.
Say specific, real things
Vague claims don't get cited. Specific ones do. "We help businesses grow" is forgettable and unquotable. "We reduced a client's cost per acquisition by rebuilding their SPF and DKIM setup so their follow-up emails stopped landing in spam" is the kind of specific, verifiable detail a model can actually use to answer a real question.
If your content could apply to literally any company in your industry, it's not helping you get recommended over them.
Technical foundations still matter, just differently
Site speed, clean structure, and accurate metadata haven't stopped mattering, they've just stopped being the whole game. A fast, well-structured site is easier for any crawler, human or AI, to actually read and trust. Neglect this and you're making it harder for a model to even access what you've written, regardless of how good the content is.
The shift to actually make
Stop writing content aimed at ranking for a keyword. Start writing content aimed at being the correct, clear, specific answer to a real question someone would ask an AI. If you do that consistently, ranking and recommendation tend to follow together, because you're solving the harder problem first.
