How to get recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI assistants

How AI assistants find people

When you ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini or Copilot about a local professional, most of them search the web, read a handful of pages, and write an answer from what they found, often with links. They rely on search indexes such as Bing’s and Google’s, and on their own crawlers. So the basics of being found on search still apply, and a few things matter even more.

1. Let their crawlers in

Providers document different crawlers for search retrieval, user-requested visits and training. For OpenAI, OAI-SearchBot supports search discovery while GPTBot concerns training. Review each provider’s current documentation and allow the search access you want without assuming training permission is required for search visibility.

2. State the facts plainly

Assistants quote sentences they can lift as they are. “Priya Shah is a chartered accountant in Leeds who does tax returns for freelancers and small companies” is easy to quote. “Passionate about numbers since forever” is not. Put your name, profession, place, specialties, prices and qualifications in plain sentences and lists.

3. Add structured data

Structured data (schema.org) is a hidden, machine-readable summary of the page: who you are, your job title, your address, your services and your opening hours. Search engines use it directly, and it removes guesswork for any system reading your page.

4. Be consistent everywhere

Assistants cross-check. If your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directory listings all give the same name, address, phone number and description of your work, the assistant can be confident they describe one real person. Contradictions make you look less reliable than someone whose details line up.

5. Be mentioned by others

Reviews on Google and trusted directories, articles, interviews and your professional body’s listing all count. Assistants weigh what others say about you, not just what you say about yourself.

6. Answer the questions people ask

A short FAQ with the questions clients actually ask (“Do you take new patients?”, “How much is a first consultation?”, “Do you work online?”) gives the assistant ready-made answers to match against the question it was asked.

7. Consider an llms.txt file

llms.txt is an emerging convention: a short plain-text summary of your site at yoursite/llms.txt, written for AI systems. Not every assistant reads it yet, but it costs nothing and gives any that do a clean, accurate summary.

8. Keep it fast and up to date

Keep pages accessible and update details when they change. Search engines choose crawl frequency; fast loading or frequent edits do not guarantee faster indexing or AI citations.

Every BeVisible page does the technical parts for you: its robots.txt welcomes the major AI crawlers, it has structured data, a sitemap entry and its own llms.txt, and changes are queued for search-engine notification. Crawling, indexing and AI citations are decided by those services.