How to show up in ChatGPT answers as a local business
More and more of your customers ask an assistant: “a good joiner in Annecy?”. What decides the answer is only partly on your website. Here is what we measured, what depends on you, and what nobody can promise.
How an assistant picks whom to quote
For a local question, ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity do not draw on their memory: they run a web search, read a few of the pages it returns, then write an answer that cites its sources. Being quoted takes two things: the search has to find you, and the page it reads has to say clearly who you are, what you do and where.
What we measured
On 11 October 2026, we asked Claude, with its web search, two questions about twelve real businesses in France, the United Kingdom and Spain: “what do you know about this site?” and “this trade in this town: what do you recommend?”.
- To the first question, the site is cited six times out of six, which is expected since its address is given. Above all, the answer says what the AI really knows of it: for one of them, only the home page, two and a half years old.
- To the recommendation, the site is cited only three times out of six, and those are three famous restaurants. In place of the others, the AI cites guides and directories: Tripadvisor, Time Out, TheFork, Yelp, PagesJaunes.
One try per question, one assistant, and mostly well-known businesses: if anything, these figures flatter what a small business will see. ChatGPT was not measured; it works the same way, search then answer, but may cite other sources. You can run the same test on your own site, for free, from our home page.
What depends on your website
- Saying plainly what you do, your town and the area you cover, on pages readable without JavaScript.
- Giving your opening hours, your prices or price ranges, your services one by one, in the words your customers type.
- Not shutting out the robots that read to answer: a robots.txt can refuse them without your knowing.
- Offering assistants a clean version of each page, and a table of contents (llms.txt) that leads them there.
That is what we do for you, from your public pages, without rewriting or inventing anything.
What does not
Your Google Business Profile, your reviews and your listings in the directories of your trade weigh heavily: they are often what the assistant reads instead of your site. Those are yours to look after. The search engine the assistant uses, its ranking and the way it chooses depend neither on you nor on us.
What nobody can promise
An AI never answers the same way twice, and no service can guarantee it will quote you. Be wary of visibility scores: a mark out of 100 measures a handful of questions on a given day. What can be fixed, on the other hand, is what the assistant finds when it comes to read your site.