Why ChatGPT doesn't recommend your business
What these systems actually read
When someone asks an assistant "who's a good plumber in Miami?", it does not inspect your shop. It builds an answer from text it can fetch and text it was trained on. In practice that means four sources:
- Pages it can fetch right now. If your site is slow, blocked, JavaScript-only, or has nothing but a phone number and a photo carousel, there is no sentence to quote.
- Structured business data. The machine-readable block in your page code that states your name, trade, service area and hours. Without it, a model has to guess whether "Bob's" is a plumber or a bakery.
- What other sites say about you. Directories, chambers, supplier pages, review platforms, news. If nobody else describes you, you are less corroborated than a competitor who is listed in six places.
- Question-and-answer content. The pages that answer "how much does X cost in Y" get quoted because the answer is stated plainly. A page that only says "contact us for a quote" answers nothing.
Why you specifically get skipped
| What your site has | What the model sees |
|---|---|
| A gallery and a phone number | No statement of trade, city, or services — nothing to quote |
| Services listed only as images | Unreadable text — images are not content |
| "Serving South Florida" | No city named, so no match for a city-specific question |
| Copyright 2015 in the footer | A site that may no longer be operating |
| No FAQ, no pricing guidance | Nothing to answer the buying question with |
None of those are catastrophic on their own. Together they mean a model that wants to recommend someone has no reason to pick you.
The five fixes, in order of impact
1. State what you do and where, in plain sentences
One paragraph near the top: what you do, which cities you cover, what makes you different, and who you do it for. If a stranger could not read your homepage and repeat that back, it is not clear enough — for a customer or a model.
2. Add the machine-readable business block
Schema markup that states business name, type, service area, hours and contact route. This is the layer AI systems read before they name anything. It is invisible to visitors and decisive for machines.
3. Answer the money questions on the page
A real FAQ: what it costs, how long it takes, what happens in an emergency, what your service area is. Assistant answers to buying questions are assembled from pages that already answer them. "Call for a quote" ends the conversation.
4. Get described accurately off your own site
Google Business Profile, the main directories, your trade associations, supplier pages. Same name, same address, same phone everywhere. Contradictory listings make you less quotable, not more visible.
5. Make the page fast and fetchable
A page that takes six seconds on mobile data is often not read at all. Static HTML, compressed images, nothing essential behind a script that has to run first.
How to find out where you stand
You do not need to guess. Check your own page the way a machine reads it: is your trade stated as text, is your city in the title, is there structured data, is there an FAQ, is there a form or a tap-to-call link. That is a 10-minute audit you can do yourself — or I will run it and send you the report free.
See whether AI can actually read your site
Free check: your page measured the way a machine reads it, plus the three fixes that matter most for your trade.
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