What being recommended by AI actually means
Being recommended by AI means an assistant names your business, by itself, when a person asks it who to hire or buy from. Nobody types your brand. They type something like "who is the best emergency plumber near me" or "where can I buy a gift for a hard-to-shop-for dad," and the assistant answers with two or three names.
That is a different event from ranking. A search results page shows ten blue links and lets the person decide. An assistant decides for them and shows a short list. If you are on it, you get the call. If you are not, the person never learns you exist, and there is no second page to scroll to.
This guide is the practical order of work for a business that wants onto that short list. It covers ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini together, because the steps that work are mostly shared. Where one engine has its own mechanics, we point to the page that covers it.
One honest limit before the steps. Nobody can guarantee a recommendation. The same question asked twice can return different names, and each assistant has its own habits. What you can do is remove every reason an assistant would have to skip you, and give it plenty of reasons to pick you.
How an assistant decides who to name
An assistant names the businesses it can read clearly and finds vouched for by sources other than the business itself. Those two conditions explain almost everything about who gets picked.
When a question needs fresh facts, the assistant searches the web, reads a handful of results, and writes an answer from what it found. It favors passages that stand on their own, because it has to lift a sentence into a short reply. It also notices who else is saying the same thing. A business described the same way in its own website, in a local news article, in a forum thread and in customer reviews looks like a safe pick. A business that only describes itself looks like a lead to check, not a name to give.
We tested this in the field rather than assuming it. In a stranger's city, across several categories, the assistants leaned on outside sources and mostly named local businesses over big chains. The full write-up is in how AI assistants pick businesses, and we will not restate its numbers here. The takeaway for this page is the mechanism: the assistant is looking for who others vouch for, for that exact job.
So the plan below has two halves. Steps one and two make you easy to read. Steps three and four make you easy to trust. Step five tells you whether any of it worked.
The five steps in order
The order matters because each step is wasted if the one before it is broken. A great review profile does nothing if the assistant's crawler is blocked from your site. Here is the whole sequence at a glance, then each step in its own section.
- Make sure AI crawlers can fetch and read your pages.
- State plainly what you do and where you do it.
- Get independent sources to vouch for you for the exact job.
- Earn reviews that name the service, not just the stars.
- Check every month with the same questions and write the answers down.
The diagram shows where a business usually drops out. The three red markers are the three most common reasons a good business never gets named.
Step one: be readable by AI crawlers
If an AI crawler cannot fetch your page and read its text, nothing else you do will matter. This step takes an afternoon and blocks everything after it, so do it first.
Three things to check. First, your robots.txt file. Look for lines that disallow the crawlers AI products use, such as OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot from OpenAI, ClaudeBot from Anthropic, and PerplexityBot. Some site templates and security plugins block them by default, and the owner never knew. Second, check whether a security layer in front of your site challenges unknown visitors. A firewall that shows a puzzle to a crawler turns your site into a locked door. Third, view your page with scripts turned off. If the text of your services disappears, a crawler that does not run scripts sees an empty page.
Then make sure your pages are in the indexes assistants search from. Submit a sitemap to Google Search Console and to Bing Webmaster Tools, both free. Several assistants search the web through a search engine, so being absent from the index means being absent from the answer.
This is plumbing, not strategy. The reward is that it is binary. Either the crawler can read you or it cannot, and you can confirm the fix the same day.
Step two: say what you do and where, in plain words
An assistant can only recommend you for a job it can match to a sentence on your site. If your homepage says "Solutions that move your business forward," the assistant has nothing to match against a question like "who fixes tankless water heaters in Tampa."
Go through your main pages and find the sentence that states the job. It should name the service in the words a customer would use, name the place if you serve a local area, and say who it is for. "We repair and replace tankless water heaters for homeowners in Tampa and Brandon" is a sentence an assistant can lift. "Quality service you can trust" is not.
Put that sentence first on the page, not fourth. Assistants favor passages that answer the question immediately, and busy readers do too. Then answer the obvious follow-ups in short paragraphs under clear headings: what it costs to expect, how long it takes, what is included, what you do not do. Each of those can stand alone as a quotable piece.
Also make sure the basics match everywhere. Your business name, address, phone and service list should read the same on your site, your Google Business Profile and your directory listings. Contradictions make an assistant less sure which facts are true, and an unsure assistant picks someone else.
Step three: get vouched for by independent sources
Outside sources that describe you for a specific job carry more weight with assistants than anything you say about yourself. This is the slowest step and the one that separates the businesses that get named from the ones that merely exist.
Think about where your category is discussed. For a restaurant it might be a local food blog, a city subreddit and a "best of" list. For a contractor it might be a neighborhood group, a supplier's recommended-installers page and a local news story. For a software company it might be review sites, comparison articles and community forums. Our page on what AI engines cite breaks down the source types by engine, and Reddit and AI search covers the one most owners underestimate.
Then earn a place in those spots honestly. Sponsor the local event whose website lists sponsors. Offer a real, useful quote to a reporter or a blogger. Answer questions in the community where your customers ask them, as yourself, without pitching. Ask suppliers and partners to list you.
Notice what is missing from that list: buying links in bulk or posting fake reviews. Assistants are built to be skeptical of exactly that, and a manufactured footprint is easy to spot. A modest set of real mentions, each tied to the exact job you want to be known for, beats a pile of generic ones.
Step four: earn reviews that name the service
A review that says what job was done, and where, is a recommendation an assistant can repeat. A five-star rating with no words is a number. A review that says "they replaced our tankless unit in one afternoon and cleaned up after" is evidence.
Assistants read review text, not only star averages. That means the words customers use end up in the answer. If every review says "great service," the assistant has nothing specific to say about you. If reviews name the work, the neighborhood and the outcome, the assistant can match you to a specific question. We cover this in detail in reviews and AI recommendations.
You cannot write your customers' reviews, and you should never try. What you can do is ask better. After a job, send a short message thanking the customer and asking one question: "If you have a minute, would you tell people what we did for you and what it was like?" That prompt invites specifics without scripting them. Make it easy by sending the direct link to your Google Business Profile review box.
Reply to reviews too, in plain words, naming the service where it fits naturally. Replies are public text on the same page, and they show an active business. Do not copy and paste the same reply to every review. Real replies read like a person wrote them, because one did.
Step five: check monthly with the same questions
You only know the work is moving anything if you ask the assistants the same questions on a schedule and write down what they say. Without a baseline you will have opinions, not evidence.
Write ten to twenty questions a real customer would ask an assistant, in their words. Include the plain version ("best plumber in Tampa"), the specific version ("who replaces tankless water heaters near Brandon") and the comparison version ("is it worth repairing an old water heater"). Our guide to building an AI visibility question set walks through writing a good one.
Once a month, run every question on the assistants your customers use. Log in a spreadsheet: which businesses were named, whether you were among them, and the exact sentence used about you. Keep the questions fixed. If you change them every month, you cannot compare month to month.
Expect noise. The same question can return different answers on different days, so one miss means little and one hit means less. Look at the pattern across questions and across months. When you want to compare tools that automate this, read how to choose an AI share of voice tool first.
What to expect and how long it takes
The technical fixes show quickly, and the reputation work takes a quarter or more. Plan for two speeds.
Steps one and two are fast. Once a crawler can read your pages and each page opens with a plain statement of the job, assistants that search live, such as Perplexity and Google's AI features, can pick up the change within days to weeks. Assistants that lean on a slower index or on their training can take longer. Our page on how to rank in ChatGPT covers one of the slower ones.
Steps three and four are slow. Mentions and reviews accumulate. Nobody can compress six months of customers talking about you into a week, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. Treat these as habits, not projects: ask for the review after every job, say yes to the local interview, keep your listings accurate.
Step five is what keeps you honest. After a quarter you should see movement in at least some questions, perhaps being named for the narrow, specific searches before the broad ones. Narrow questions are easier to win, because fewer businesses are vouched for in that exact niche. If nothing moves at all after a quarter, the check will usually point at which step is broken, and you can go back and fix that one.
For the cross-engine view of what each AI search surface reads, see how to show up in AI search.
How RunOctopus handles this
RunOctopus is a done-for-you service. Its AI, Ollie, researches a business, then writes and publishes pages directly on the business's own website, with a team that plans, writes, reviews and publishes alongside Ollie. It works with Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce and Wix.
That covers the content half of this guide: pages that state plainly what you do and where, answers to the follow-up questions buyers ask, and the internal links that tie them together. There is nothing to install, approve, upload or schedule. In the first week that means 8 long-form articles, 6 pages and a custom interactive tool built for your niche, and after that 175+ pieces of content a month.
RunOctopus also reports on where ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini name your business, which is step five of this guide done for you. The 90-day promise is more visibility on Google and in AI answers within 90 days, measured against the 90 days before you joined, or every dollar back.
The reviews and outside mentions in steps three and four are about real customers and real communities, so they stay yours. You can see how the site reads today with a free site read: paste your address at app.runoctopus.com/start and Ollie shows the plan. No account, no call.