How to rank in ChatGPT: what matters for a local business

More and more people ask ChatGPT to recommend a dentist, a plumber or a restaurant. The answer usually holds three or four names: in my study on local SEO and AI ChatGPT named 3.7 on average, close to the 4.1 BrightLocal measured across 200,000 US searches. Being on that list is worth a lot. This guide collects what I measured about ChatGPT specifically, by asking 352 questions about businesses in Catania, Sicily, and the surrounding towns and comparing the answers with 1,353 Google profiles and 810 websites.

Where ChatGPT gets the names

Share of ChatGPT answers citing at least one source of each type:

And when it searches the web before answering, ChatGPT looks for reviews: in the first collection, 34 of its 43 searches contained the word «reviews».

What gets you recommended by ChatGPT

The study’s statistical model measures each factor holding the others equal. For ChatGPT the result is clear: it behaves like a Google Maps reader. It is the only engine for which rating, reviews and top positions all matter together.

Rating is the strongest factor, and the most visible one: ChatGPT often reports rating and review count next to the names. According to SOCi, businesses recommended by ChatGPT average 4.3 stars (SOCi, 2026).

What ChatGPT read on my own website

Before giving advice I tested it on myself. In September 2026 I put a prospect’s question to GPT-5.4 with web search: a freelance SEO consultant in Sicily with iGaming experience. Three things taught me more than many articles:

• It cited me three times, but only from my homepage (the English one). It never opened the pages about my experience and services.
• It ranked me second because I «seem more like an agency than a freelancer»: my homepage title said «SEO Agency». Every search the model ran before answering contained the word «freelance». The title matters more than I thought.
• It didn’t read my llms.txt, which clearly said «independent consultant, not an agency». That fits the study, where llms.txt had no measurable effect.

I fixed what I could without changing my positioning: my site’s structured data now states that one person works behind the brand. In my October 15 check, across eight questions from my own field, ChatGPT was the only engine that cited me (twice out of eight), quoting from my homepage the Clinica VR Catania case and the fact that you talk directly to the person doing the work. Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews didn’t cite me.

My clients do better. With GPT-5.5 and web search, in October 2026, Clinica VR came first both for «paediatric rehabilitation with virtual reality in Catania» and for «physiotherapy with virtual reality in Catania»: two different questions, same result. Claude also cites it for back pain, linking the page dedicated to that service, in the collection I ran for the guide to search engines beyond Google.

What to do, in order

1. Work on reviews and rating. Ask every customer, with your review link, and aim to stay above 4.8. How many you need is in how many Google reviews do you need.
2. Link your own website to the profile, one that clearly says what you do, for whom and in which city. A business that mentions a service on its homepage has almost four times the odds of being suggested for that service.
3. Complete your Google profile: categories and services get you into more searches. The Google Business Profile guide explains how.
4. Get listed on your industry’s directory: more than half of ChatGPT’s answers cite one. In the study, for healthcare professionals a directory profile linked to the Google profile worked as well as a website.
5. Keep name, address and phone identical across profile, website and directories, so you don’t get confused with someone else.

What doesn’t help

• Followers: 30 of the 70 most-cited businesses in the study have fewer than 1,000 followers on their biggest social account, and ChatGPT never cited social media as a source in its answers.
• Coverage in big newspapers: Seer Interactive found a near-zero correlation with ChatGPT mentions (Seer, 2025).
• «Best [trade] in [city]» pages written about yourself: they sometimes work for a while, but in an Ahrefs experiment AI still recommended a competitor 43% of the time and, according to Lily Ray, Google has started penalising sites full of them.
• An llms.txt file: no measurable effect on citations.

Don’t trust a single test

Answers change. In one test, repeating the same questions two and a half hours apart, ChatGPT kept three names out of four, while AI Overviews changed all four. And engines disagree with each other: on the same question, ChatGPT and Perplexity had no name in common 48% of the time. To know whether ChatGPT recommends you, you need many questions repeated over time, not one try from your phone.

The full picture, engine by engine, is in the study. The work of getting cited by AI is described on the generative engine optimisation page.