Why ChatGPT doesn't recommend your business (and what to do about it)

Ask ChatGPT "who's a good electrician in Mandurah?" and it will give you three or four names, with a sentence on each about why. No ten blue links, no map pack, no scrolling. One answer. If your business isn't in it, as far as that customer is concerned you don't exist.

This isn't a future problem. In our audits across Perth and regional WA, we're already seeing businesses lose enquiries to competitors who are, on paper, no better than them. The difference is that the competitor is legible to the systems doing the recommending. Here's what that means in practice.

How the answer gets made

When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for a recommendation, the assistant does a quick search, reads a handful of pages, and writes an answer from what it found. It leans on the same things a careful person would: Google results, your website, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and whether other sites mention you. Then it looks for reasons to prefer one business over another: clear service areas, specific services, recent reviews, signs that you're real and current.

The assistant isn't guessing. It's summarising what the internet says about you. If the internet says very little, so does the assistant.

The five things that get you recommended

1. A page for each thing you do, in each place you do it. "Plumber" is not a page. "Blocked drains in Joondalup" is. Assistants quote specifics, and they can only quote what's written down.
2. A Google Business Profile that's actually maintained. Correct categories, hours, service areas, photos from this year, and a post every couple of weeks. Most small-business profiles were set up once and never touched.
3. Reviews that mention the job. "Great service" helps less than "fixed our hot water system the same day in Clarkson". Ask customers to say what you did and where.
4. Being mentioned elsewhere. Directories, supplier pages, local news, industry bodies. Each one is a second source saying you're real.
5. Fresh content answering real questions. A short article a fortnight on the questions customers ask ("how much does a switchboard upgrade cost in WA?") gives assistants something to cite and gives Google a reason to keep coming back.

What it doesn't take

It doesn't take a huge site, a big ad budget or a redesign every two years. Most of the businesses that get recommended are small, specific and consistent. That's the whole trick: say clearly what you do and where, keep saying it, and make it easy to verify.