How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini?

The disqualifier nobody checks

We crawled the homepages of 1,348 companies that had just raised funding and measured how much of each page survives without JavaScript. 8.7% returned a shell. The median broken one served 55 characters of readable text where the rendered page had 5,358.

The counterintuitive part is who was affected. Sites built on modern JavaScript frameworks were the worst — Next.js at 8.5%, HubSpot CMS at 10.0%. Sites on Wix and Squarespace produced zero failures out of 91. A company that raised millions and hired real engineers was more likely to be invisible to ChatGPT than one paying $16 a month for Wix.

This is not an argument for Wix. It is an argument for checking, because the failure is completely invisible to the person who built the site — it renders perfectly in their browser.

What "answer-first" actually means

Most business pages are written to create curiosity. An assistant does not experience curiosity. It extracts whatever passage best answers the question and attributes it.

So the page needs a passage worth extracting: a direct answer, early, that makes sense with no surrounding context. If your pricing page says "every project is unique, contact us for a quote", there is nothing to extract and you will not be named. If it says "most kitchen remodels in Metro Detroit run $8,000 to $14,000, driven mainly by cabinet choice and whether plumbing moves", that is a quotable sentence and you become the source of it.

The same structure that makes a page quotable also makes it convert better with humans, which is the rare case where the optimisation and the honest thing are identical.

Where each assistant actually gets local answers

The advice that circulates here is mostly out of date. Two things changed recently and both matter more than any on-page tactic.

ChatGPT no longer leans on Bing for business results the way it did. Foursquare now supplies more than 70% of its local results, and in July 2026 OpenAI licensed Yelp’s 330 million reviews and 8 million listings. If your Yelp and Foursquare records are wrong or missing, that is the gap.

For Bing Places, Whitespark found Facebook is the number one review source surfacing in results — ahead of Yelp. Almost nobody works Facebook reviews, which makes it one of the few genuine edges still lying around.

And Reddit remains the second-largest local citation source at 13.7%, beating Angi, Thumbtack and HomeAdvisor combined. Reduced from its peak, not gone.

Why nobody can sell you an AI ranking

Ask Gemini the same local question twice and it names the same top business roughly 7% of the time. The cited sources overlap about 40%. The output is not a ranking — it is a sample from a distribution that changes between identical queries.

Anyone promising you position one in ChatGPT is selling something that does not exist. What can be delivered is eligibility: being readable, being quotable, being consistent across the sources the models actually read. Do that and you show up some of the time instead of none of the time.

Size the opportunity honestly too. AI referrals are around 1.08% of site traffic. They convert better than average, though the published multiples are all over the place and the methodology behind them is weak. It is a compounding side bet, funded by the channel that pays the bills today.

Common questions

Does llms.txt actually do anything?

No crawler is required to read it and none has documented doing so as a ranking input. It takes an hour, it costs nothing, and it gives any agent that does fetch it an unambiguous statement of what you sell and what it costs. Treat it as cheap insurance, not as a strategy.

Should I block AI crawlers to protect my content?

If you want to be cited, no — blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended removes you from the answers. Blocking makes sense if your content is the product and being summarised destroys its value. For a local service business it is self-harm.

How do I know if my site is readable by AI assistants?

Request the page the way a non-JavaScript crawler does and read what comes back. If the visible text is under a couple of hundred characters, your page is a shell. We run a free check at revioconsulting.com/tools/ai-visibility that does exactly this and shows you the text a crawler receives.

Is this replacing SEO?

It is the same work with a different acceptance test. Readable pages, clear structure, real answers, consistent listings and genuine reviews were always the fundamentals. What changed is that the reward moved from a blue link position to being the quoted source, and that pages written to withhold the answer now lose twice.