Local AI search · Original data
How do I get my business listed on ChatGPT
There is no form to fill in and no directory to join. ChatGPT has no business listing the way Google Business Profile has one, so nobody can add you to it, including the people selling that service.
What it does have is a set of pages it reads while writing an answer. Get onto those pages and your name appears. Stay off them and it does not, no matter how good your own website is.
We measured which pages those are. In October 2026 we ran eight customer questions about bakeries across three Miami neighbourhoods and recorded every source the model used. The list came out looking like this: Google, Yelp, Eater, The Infatuation, Coral Gables Magazine, Miami and Beaches, and a handful of ordering platforms. Most of them are city magazines, review sites and food guides, which means they were written by somebody other than the business itself.
Your own site barely registers in that list. Across those runs the model opened almost no business websites at all.
So the work splits into three parts, and they are not equal.
First, get listed where the model already looks. For most towns that means the big review platforms and the two or three local guides that write round-ups. A listing with current hours and a real description does more than a month of writing on your own blog.
Second, get written about. One mention in a city magazine round-up carries further than any page you control, because the model treats it as somebody else's opinion rather than your own marketing. Pitching a local editor is slow and unglamorous, and it works.
Third, make sure the robot can reach you when it does come. The crawler that feeds ChatGPT answers is called OAI-SearchBot. Some sites block it in robots.txt without meaning to, and some security setups turn it away as suspicious traffic. Both are invisible to you, because people still see the site fine.
Before any of that, find out where you stand. Ask ChatGPT the question your customer would ask, in your town, and read who it names. That takes a minute, and it tells you which of the three jobs above is actually yours.