How ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity decide which businesses to recommend (and how to become one)

Type "who is a good dentist in Jumeirah?" or "which agency builds Next.js websites for clinics?" into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok or Perplexity and you get three to five named businesses. Those recommendations are now a real source of enquiries, and most businesses have no idea how they are chosen. Having built sites specifically to earn these citations, here is what the process actually looks like.

How do AI assistants answer a recommendation question?

For anything local or current, the model does not answer from memory. It runs a web search (OpenAI and Perplexity use their own and Bing-based indexes; Gemini uses Google), fetches a handful of pages, reads them, and writes an answer that cites the clearest sources. Three things decide whether you are in that answer: whether you are retrievable (the crawler can fetch and index you), whether you are legible (the model can tell who you are, what you do, where and for whom), and whether you are corroborated (other sources agree).

What makes a page retrievable?

Server-rendered HTML — client-only JavaScript apps often come back blank to retrieval crawlers. An open robots.txt that does not block GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended. Fast responses (crawlers give up on slow pages). An XML sitemap and canonical URLs. An llms.txt file at your root is an inexpensive bonus: a plain-text summary of your business and key pages written for machines.

What makes a page legible to a model?

Models extract facts from sentences, so write the facts as sentences. "The Dev Studio is a web design and development agency founded in 2011, serving clinics and businesses in the UK, Australia, Europe and North America" beats a hero that says "Crafting digital experiences". Put prices on the page. Use headings phrased as the questions people ask and follow each with a direct answer. Mark it up with schema.org: Organization or LocalBusiness with address and sameAs links, Service, FAQPage, Review. Keep name, address and phone identical everywhere.

What makes a business corroborated?

Models trust facts that appear in more than one place. Google reviews with real text, directory listings, LinkedIn and Instagram profiles that say the same things as your site, mentions on partners' and clients' websites, and articles that cite you. The sites being recommended most are rarely the biggest — they are the ones whose story is consistent across the web.

A practical 30-day plan

Week one: run the free checker below, open robots.txt to AI crawlers, add llms.txt and fix anything red. Week two: rewrite your home and about pages with plain entity statements and prices, add FAQ sections with FAQPage schema to every service page. Week three: add Organization/LocalBusiness schema with sameAs, align your Google Business Profile and social bios. Week four: ask ten happy customers for Google reviews that mention the service and location, and ask one partner to link to you. Then ask the assistants your customers' questions and watch what changes.