.webp)
To get your business recommended by ChatGPT, make it easy for ChatGPT to find you, easy to understand what you do, and easy to check that you're legitimate. Your website handles the first two. The rest of the web handles the third. There's no form to submit and no way to pay for a place in ChatGPT's organic answers, which also means no competitor can buy their way past you.
This guide is for New Zealand business owners rather than web developers, and it's written by What IF Web, a Christchurch studio that tracks AI recommendations for our own business and our clients every month. If you want the technical deep end, our 10 ways to get cited by AI search covers it. This one sticks to what moves the needle and what you can do yourself.
It matters here more than you'd think. In our own survey of 83 New Zealanders who'd used an AI chatbot in the past three months, 90.4% used one at least weekly and 67.5% used one most days. If your customers are in that group, some of them are already asking ChatGPT who to call.
How does ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?
ChatGPT recommends businesses based on what it can read about them on the web when someone asks. For a question like "who's a good accountant in Hamilton", ChatGPT searches the web, reads what it finds, and names the businesses with the clearest, best-supported answer. OpenAI publishes its crawler rules and says placement in ChatGPT search isn't guaranteed. There's no secret ranking factor to buy.
Two kinds of information decide whether you're named. The first is your own website: whether ChatGPT can reach it, and whether it says clearly what you do, who for and where. The second is everything else: your Google Business Profile, directory listings, reviews, local news, and the "best X in Y" articles ChatGPT leans on for recommendation questions. Your site makes the claim, and other sites confirm it. A business with a great website and no outside footprint usually loses to a slightly worse business that every directory agrees on.
What can you do to make your business appear in AI answers?
Six things, roughly in the order we'd tackle them. Most can be done in-house.
1. Make sure ChatGPT can reach your website
OpenAI runs three separate crawlers, and the one that decides whether you show up in ChatGPT search is OAI-SearchBot. GPTBot collects training data and ChatGPT-User fetches pages a person asks about, but OAI-SearchBot builds the index ChatGPT searches. OpenAI says plainly that sites blocking it won't appear in ChatGPT search answers. Ask your developer to check that your robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot and that your hosting firewall or Cloudflare settings aren't quietly turning it away. It's the cheapest fix on this list, and the most expensive one to leave broken.
2. Say plainly what you do, who for, and where
ChatGPT matches businesses to questions by reading your words, so vague copy loses. "Quality solutions for every need" gives it nothing to work with. "Residential electrician in Christchurch, specialising in switchboard upgrades and EV chargers" tells it exactly when you're the right answer. Put that kind of sentence near the top of your homepage, and give each main service its own page that names the service, the area you cover and the kind of customer you're best for.
3. Publish answers to the questions your buyers ask
People ask ChatGPT full questions, not keywords. "How much does a heat pump install cost in Wellington?" "What should I ask a builder before I hire them?" If your site answers those questions directly, with real prices, real timeframes and real examples, ChatGPT has something specific to quote. Write the answer in the first sentence or two, then explain. The best source of questions is your own inbox, because every question a customer has emailed you is one someone else is asking ChatGPT.
4. Get listed, reviewed and mentioned where ChatGPT looks
This is the biggest lever and the slowest one. ChatGPT trusts businesses that independent sources agree on. For most NZ businesses that means a complete Google Business Profile, a presence on the directories that matter in your industry, and a steady flow of genuine reviews. It also means being named in the local "best of" articles that ChatGPT reads for recommendation questions. To find out which sources count in your category, ask ChatGPT the questions your buyers ask and look at the links it cites. Those are the sites to be on. Real reviews from real customers only, because fake ones get filtered and can do more harm than none.
5. Keep your business details identical everywhere
ChatGPT builds its picture of your business from every place you appear. If your Google listing says one phone number, your website another and an old directory a third, you look less certain to the engine than a competitor whose details line up. Pick one version of your name, address, phone number and service list. Use it everywhere, and update the old listings you'd forgotten about.
6. Check what ChatGPT says about you, the same way every month
Ask ChatGPT the questions a customer would, without naming your business, and note who comes up and which sites it cites. One-off checks are noisy because answers shift day to day. So keep a fixed list of questions and run the same list each month. Track ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity separately, because they disagree more than you'd expect about who to recommend.
What doesn't work?
Plenty of what's being sold as "ChatGPT SEO" doesn't move anything. llms.txt files get no special treatment from any of the major AI engines. Keyword stuffing makes things worse, according to peer-reviewed research on generative engine optimisation. Chopping your content into fragments for the robots doesn't help either, and nor do bought mentions or fake reviews.
Schema markup gets oversold too. It's worth having for Google and Bing, but a controlled 2026 study found adding it made close to no difference to ChatGPT citations. Treat it as tidy housekeeping, not a recommendation engine.
And walk away from anyone who guarantees you a spot in ChatGPT's answers. OpenAI itself says placement isn't guaranteed, so neither can an agency be.
Is it worth paying someone to help your business show up in AI search?
It depends on whether your customers use AI to find businesses like yours, and on how crowded your category is. A local business with a handful of competitors can get a long way alone with steps 1, 2 and 5 above, plus a steady effort on reviews. That's honest work, and it's free.
Paying for help makes sense when the category is competitive, when you don't have the time to write and chase listings every month, or when you need to prove it's working across several engines. The hard parts are knowing which sources ChatGPT trusts in your field, writing content good enough to be quoted, and measuring it properly. Those are the parts an agency earns its fee on.
What IF Web's AI Search retainer starts from $1,750 a month NZD plus GST, and we start every client with a free Review & Health Check so you know where you stand before spending anything. Whoever you talk to, ask what they'll track, which engines, and how they'll show you it moved. If the answer is vague, or comes with a guaranteed ranking, keep looking.
What has this looked like for What IF Web?
What IF Web tracks a fixed set of buyer questions every month in Otterly.AI, for our own business and for clients. Between 13 September and 13 October 2026, whatifweb.co.nz was the most cited website in our Marketing Websites tracking, with roughly 2,370 citations across the AI engines we monitor.
The pages doing the work weren't our service pages. They were our "best web design agencies in Christchurch" style guides and our Christchurch location pages, because those answer the exact questions people type. (We wrote those lists, and yes, we're on them, so weigh that how you like.) The same tracking showed one of our own service pages earning zero citations, which is why we rewrote it. Tracking tells you where you're invisible, not just where you're winning.
