How to Get Recommended by ChatGPT: An Irish Guide

There is no single trick that makes ChatGPT recommend a business. Placement is never guaranteed, because ChatGPT search uses several factors, and a site blocking OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI’s crawler that gathers pages for ChatGPT search) will not appear at all, as OpenAI Developers confirms. For most Irish local-service firms, the practical work is in Google reviews and consistent listings, not in a website trick.

The practical steps to get recommended by ChatGPT#

The work starts off the website, not on it. Take Liam, who runs a small heating and plumbing firm in Killarney and wants to be the name ChatGPT gives when a homeowner asks for a plumber locally. Almost everything he can control is held in reviews, listings and crawler access rather than in page design.

Location is the first piece to understand. According to the OpenAI Help Center, ChatGPT may use an approximate location based on the IP address to give relevant local results. The same page notes that it sometimes partners with other search providers, and that its search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect.

Liam works through the steps below in order, because each one makes the next easier.

1. Check that OpenAI’s crawler is allowed. Open the site’s robots.txt file, or ask the web host, and confirm nothing blocks OAI-SearchBot. A template copied from elsewhere often blocks bots nobody has heard of, so this ten-minute check comes first.
2. Complete the Google Business Profile. Verify the Google Business Profile (Google’s free listing for a business’s address, hours and reviews.), then set the right category, service area, hours and service list.
3. Make four details identical everywhere. Trading name, address, phone number and service list should match exactly on Google, the website, social pages and any directory that already carries the business.
4. Ask every recent customer, then reply. A short request at the end of a job works better than a bulk email months later. A one-line reply shows the review was read.
5. Never buy, swap or write reviews. The legal position is covered below, and the risk to the listing is not worth it.
6. Give ChatGPT pages it can read. A plain page for each main service, naming the town and the job, helps any system confirm what the business does.

Steps one to three take an afternoon for most small firms.

Watch out: If the site blocks OpenAI’s crawler, nothing else here will help, because the site cannot appear in ChatGPT search answers at all.

The website side has its own guide to getting found in ChatGPT search, while this piece stays with reviews and listings.

Why Google reviews matter for ChatGPT recommendations#

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Reviews are the part of the picture Liam can change this month. According to Google Business Profile Help, local results rest mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. In plain terms, that is how well the listing matches the search, how close the business is, and how well known it is.

The same page says more reviews with positive ratings can help a business’s local ranking, and that replying to reviews shows the business values customer feedback. Distance works differently in ChatGPT, which uses an approximate location, but relevance and how well known a business is still carry through the pages any search system can read.

For Liam, that means a profile that names his services plainly and a steady flow of recent reviews. Reviews that mention the job and the town in a customer’s own words give any reader, human or machine, a clearer picture of what he does. Replies matter too, because they show the review was read and let the business correct a wrong detail, such as a service it no longer offers.

How many Google reviews does a business need?#

Liam asked this first, and the honest answer is that no official minimum exists. Google gives no threshold in its guidance, and says only that more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking, as noted above. In practice, a small, recent and detailed set of reviews gives a system more to work with than a large set that is old and says nothing.

So the count is only one of several things to watch:

• Recency: are there reviews from the last few months?
• Relevance: do they name the service and the town?
• Detail: do they describe the job that was done?
• Consistency: is the flow steady rather than one burst?
• Replies: does every review get an answer?

None of this is worth bending the rules for. The CCPC notes that the Consumer Rights Act 2022 prohibits businesses in Ireland from posting, or paying others to post, fake reviews of their products. Liam sets a routine instead of a target: ask after every completed job, reply within a week, and keep going through quiet months.

Do Google reviews matter more than third-party review sites?#

Liam also asked whether he should chase reviews on other platforms. For local work, Google reviews come first, because Google’s own guidance ties reviews to local ranking and the profile is built to be read by search engines. Third-party reviews earn their place differently: as corroboration. When the same business name, address and services appear on an independent site, a second source confirms the record.

The practical rule is to fix what already exists rather than open new accounts. If a directory page appears when Liam searches his own business name, it is worth correcting; if it does not appear anywhere, it can wait.

Reviews also involve personal data. If Liam keeps reviewer contact details in a spreadsheet or a CRM (Software that holds customer details, calls and sales notes.), GDPR (EU data protection rules that apply in Ireland.) applies, and the Data Protection Commission is the Irish regulator for it. Keep the data minimal, say why it is held, and delete it when it is no longer needed.

How to improve listings without changing the website#

None of this needs a new website, which is the part Liam found most useful. Every change below is off-site and can be made by whoever manages the Google profile.

• Complete every field in the profile: category, service area, hours, services, photos and a short description.
• Correct details that already appear on social pages, trade listings and map entries.
• Remove duplicate records created by an old address or a renamed business.
• Answer questions posted on the profile, and add the answers to service pages later if they keep coming up.
• Keep reviews recent by asking after each job.

Tip: Start with the listings that already appear when you search your own business name, rather than opening new accounts.

The only website change worth making at this stage is correcting a wrong phone number or address on the site itself, because that error spreads everywhere. Everything else can wait until the listings agree with each other.

How long does it take for review and listing changes to affect ChatGPT?#

Timing was Liam’s last question, and it is the one nobody can answer with a date. OpenAI’s help page, noted above, says its search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect, so a change may take time to appear in any single answer.

What can be done is to keep a simple log. Ask the same question in the same words once a month and write down what came back. Watch for the business being described accurately, even when it is not recommended, because that is an early sign the record is being read. Location adds another variable, since ChatGPT may use an approximate IP location, so two people in the same town can get different answers.

Note: ChatGPT can answer the same question differently on two days, so judge progress over a month rather than a single reply.

Alongside this, on-site basics still count. The wider work of search engine optimisation, which means helping a site rank in search results, is worth doing in parallel rather than instead.

How Baikou checks whether ChatGPT names a local business#

Baikou’s team starts this work with its free AI visibility check. It first reads the website the way AI assistants do: the main page, robots.txt and the sitemap, which shows at once whether OpenAI’s crawler is blocked. It then asks ChatGPT, with web search switched on, the questions a customer would ask about that type of business in that town, and records whether the business is named, which businesses are named instead and three things to fix first. When competitors are named and the business is not, the team compares their reviews and listings with the business’s own record before suggesting any website work.

What it takes to put review and listing data to work across an Irish business#

Doing this once is easy for Liam; keeping it right as a business grows is where the effort goes.

• Sync the core details across systems. The accounting system, the CRM, the website and Google should hold one identical record for each location.
• Move the existing data deliberately. Export the current location list, check for duplicates, and decide which record is the master before anything is edited.
• Give ownership and approvals. Name one person who can edit listings and one route for replying to reviews, with a short tone note for complaints.
• Train the people who ask and answer. Staff need to know when to ask, what not to say, and how to handle a review that describes a problem.
• Expect edge cases. Irish-language place names, Street versus Sráid, service-area businesses with no counter, and branches sharing a phone number all confuse tools built elsewhere.

Off-the-shelf tools handle a simple sync but rarely those edge cases. Where several locations are involved, or nobody in-house has the hours, it is worth looking at local SEO support before duplicate listings pile up.

Start with the record, not the website#

The next step for a business like Liam’s is small and unglamorous: confirm that OpenAI’s crawler is allowed, complete the Google profile, and set a routine for asking and replying to reviews. Then keep the name, address, phone and services identical wherever the business appears. That work improves how the business looks to any system that reads the web, not only ChatGPT. Baikou helps Irish businesses with local visibility and AI search work, and the starting point is baikou.agency.

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