How ChatGPT picks who to recommend
ChatGPT doesn't rank websites. It reads a handful of sources and names the businesses they agree on. Here's what it weighs.
Google shows a list of links and lets people choose. ChatGPT reads for them and gives an answer: two or three names, with a line or two about each. If you're not one of them, most people never hear about you.
It doesn't have a secret ranking of businesses. When someone asks “who's the best plumber in Denver?”, ChatGPT searches the web, reads a handful of pages and names the businesses those pages agree on. So the question isn't how to rank in ChatGPT. It's what ChatGPT reads, and what those pages say about you.
What it reads
Mostly other people's websites. In our Local AI Index for November 2026, we asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode 800 questions like “best plumber in Denver” across 10 trades and 10 cities. 62% of what they cited was a directory, a review site or a best-of list. Businesses' own websites got 29%. ChatGPT leaned hardest on best-of lists: 46% of what it cited.
That's good news. You can't edit ChatGPT, but you can get onto the pages it reads, and make your own website easy to quote.
The five things that move it
- It can read your website: nothing in your settings turns its crawler away.
- Your facts are clear and the same everywhere: name, services, towns, phone and hours.
- The sites it trusts mention you: directories, review sites and best-of lists for your trade and city.
- Your pages answer the questions customers ask, in the first line, with real specifics.
- There's proof it can repeat: reviews, years in business, licences and guarantees.
The rest of this course takes them one at a time. Nobody can promise ChatGPT will recommend you, and answers change from one ask to the next. These are the things that make it more likely.
Do this before the next lesson
- Open ChatGPT and ask the question your customers ask, the way they'd ask it: “Who's the best [your service] in [your town]?”
- Ask it two more ways, for example “I need a [service] in [town], who would you recommend?” Write down every business it names, and the websites it links to.
- Keep the list. It's your starting point, and you'll use the websites in lesson four.
In Groow
Groow asks these questions for you every week, on ChatGPT and the other AI assistants, several times each, and shows how often you're named next to your competitors.
Try Groow free