ValleyFill

Article

Why ChatGPT recommends your competitor (and what you can actually control)

Published . Topics: ai search, local business, robots txt, schema, google business profile.

You asked ChatGPT for “the best roofer near me,” and it named the company across town. The one with the van that’s always parked at the coffee shop. You have more reviews. You answer the phone. What happened?

Here’s the honest answer: nobody outside OpenAI, Google and the other AI companies knows exactly how their assistants pick names. Anyone selling a guaranteed “get recommended by ChatGPT” package is guessing, or hoping you won’t ask follow-up questions.

But the companies have published a fair amount about how their systems find and read the web. That gives you a short list of things you can actually control. None of them guarantees a mention. Skipping them makes it easy for an assistant to leave you out.

Two ways an assistant “knows” about you

It helps to split this in two:

So the practical goal is simple to state: be findable, readable and consistent wherever an assistant might look.

1. Make sure the search crawlers can get in

This is a common self-inflicted wound, and it’s usually an accident.

OpenAI documents a crawler called OAI-SearchBot and says sites that opt out of it “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links.” It’s separate from GPTBot, which OpenAI says crawls content that may be used for training. You can allow one and block the other. (OpenAI crawler docs)

Google says there are “no additional requirements” to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond normal Search best practices, and that includes letting Googlebot crawl. (Google: AI features and your website)

Things to check:

We wrote a longer explainer on robots.txt and AI crawlers if you want the details.

2. Say the same thing everywhere

If your website says “Main St Plumbing,” your Google listing says “Main Street Plumbing & Drain,” and your Facebook page still lists the phone number from 2019, an assistant has three slightly different businesses to reconcile. Machines are not famous for giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Google’s own list of fundamentals for its AI features includes “making sure that important content is available in textual form” and “checking that your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up-to-date.” (Google)

3. Add schema, but keep your expectations sensible

Structured data (schema.org markup, usually JSON-LD) is a tidy, machine-readable summary of facts already on your page: name, address, phone, hours, service area. Google documents LocalBusiness structured data for Search features.

Now the honest part. For its AI features specifically, Google says “there’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add,” and that your structured data should match the visible text on the page. So schema isn’t a secret password. It’s a way to state your facts clearly and consistently. Think of it as good handwriting, not a bribe.

The rule that matters most: schema must match what’s on the page. If your markup says you’re open Sundays and your page says you’re not, you’ve made things worse.

4. Reviews and your profile: the unglamorous stuff

For regular local results, Google says rankings are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence, and that prominence draws on things like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. (Google Business Profile help) We don’t know how much of that carries into any particular AI assistant, but assistants that search the web are reading the same listings and pages everyone else is.

What’s in your control:

5. Check, then check again later

AI answers vary by person, place, wording and day. Asking once and panicking is a hobby, not a strategy. Once a month, ask two or three assistants the questions your customers actually ask, write down what you see, and look for patterns rather than single results.

What we can’t tell you

We can’t tell you why a specific assistant named a specific competitor on a specific day. Neither can anyone else without access to that company’s systems. What we can say is that the steps above are drawn from what the companies have published, they’re cheap, and they also help with plain old search. That’s not a bad deal for an afternoon’s work.

This article is general information, not legal or professional advice. Results vary, and no one can guarantee that any search engine or AI assistant will mention or recommend a business.

Start with the free check

Not sure whether your site is even letting AI search crawlers in? Run your homepage through our free AI Crawler Checker. It reads your robots.txt and lists, bot by bot, what’s allowed. No sign-up. Then try the AI-Readiness Check for titles, descriptions, structured data and name/address/phone, and the Schema Generator if you need LocalBusiness markup.

All articles