How to Get Your Business Recommended by AI: A Checklist

Step 1: Measure your baseline

• Write 5 questions a customer would ask, in their words, with your city or niche ("best bookkeeper for restaurants in Calgary").
• Ask each in ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, 3 times each, in a fresh chat with web search on.
• Record every business named, in order, and the sources linked.
• Score yourself and each competitor as "recommended in X of N runs."
• Note which sources keep appearing: your site, Google or Bing listings, directories, review sites, news.

Pay most attention to that last item. It shows where assistants look for information about your category.

Step 2: Your website

• One page per main service or product, each answering one question clearly.
• Key facts in plain text near the top: what you do, where, price range, hours, who it’s for.
• An FAQ with the questions customers actually ask you.
• Comparisons where honest ("X vs Y: which is right for you").
• Main content is in the page’s HTML, not only inside images or PDFs.
• Pages are indexable and not blocked in robots.txt.

This is ordinary good SEO. Google’s guidance for its AI features says the same fundamentals apply and no special schema or AI text file is required.

Step 3: Listings and profiles

• Google Business Profile complete: category, services, hours, photos, service area.
• Bing Places claimed. Copilot draws on Bing.
• Name, address and phone identical everywhere.
• The main directories for your industry claimed and current.
• Respond to reviews. Don’t incentivize or fake them.

If Step 1 showed an assistant repeatedly citing a directory you aren’t on, add that directory first.

Step 4: Mentions on pages AI already cites

• Identify the "best X in Y" lists and comparison pages that appeared in your baseline answers.
• Ask to be considered, with facts the author can verify.
• Local press, chamber listings and trade associations.
• Partner and supplier pages that can reference you.

Our own site shows this can work without a big backlink profile. Bing reported roughly 9,900 AI citations of FundBizPro in about 85 days while Bing Site Explorer showed zero backlinks on the 17 URLs it sampled. The details and caveats are in the case study.

Step 5: Track it monthly

• Re-run the same 5 questions monthly, with the same assistants and the same number of runs.
• If you have a site, check Bing Webmaster Tools → AI Performance for citations and grounding queries.
• Log what you changed each month, so you can compare.

What not to do: buy reviews (the FTC’s rule allows civil penalties against knowing violators), stuff pages with AI-bait keywords, or pay for "guaranteed AI rankings." No outside party controls what assistants say.

Frequently Asked Questions

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