How to show up on ChatGPT and Google if you run a small business

More and more people ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google where to eat, which hotel to book or who to call, and they get an answer with just a few names. This guide explains how that answer gets put together and what you can do, step by step, to get your business among the sources. Everything it says has a source listed at the end.

Updated November 3, 2026

What changed in the way people search

It used to be that someone looking for a business saw a list of links and picked one. Today, in many searches, they first see a written answer: on Google it's called an AI Overview, and ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini answer right in the conversation. Those answers cite just a few sources.

The good news for a small business is that the rules aren't secret. Google says there are no special requirements to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode: the page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet in regular search.[1] The other assistants publish which crawler they use and how to let it in.

This work is called GEO (generative engine optimization) or AEO (answer engine optimization). The term GEO comes from an academic study presented in 2024.[2]

How each assistant reaches your business

When an assistant searches the web, it uses a program that reads pages. If that program can't get into your site, your page isn't part of the answer.

Step 1: your Google Business Profile

If you serve customers at a location or in an area, start here. It's free, and it's what Google shows on the map. Google ranks local results by three things: relevance (whether your profile matches what's being searched), distance and prominence (how well known your business is).[6]

• Verify your profile. Google says verified businesses are more likely to show up.[6]
• Fill in everything: address or service area, hours, category, phone, website and attributes like parking or Wi-Fi.
• Reply to reviews, the good ones and the bad ones.
• Upload real photos of your place, your products and your team.

Step 2: your own website that answers in text

An Instagram profile helps people follow you, but assistants build their answers from pages they can read. A website on your own domain is the source you control.

• Text, not just images. A menu in a photo or a PDF is hard to read. Write your dishes, prices and hours on the page itself.
• One page for each important thing. “Beach weddings” and “ocean-view rooms” are different searches; each one deserves its own page.
• Real FAQs. The questions you get on WhatsApp every day, answered clearly: whether pets are allowed, whether there's parking, how much the first class costs.
• Specific facts. In the study that gave GEO its name, adding cited sources, direct quotes and statistics were among the changes that most increased a text's visibility in AI answers, between 30% and 40% in their test set, while stuffing the text with keywords didn't help.[2] It's an experiment, not a Google rule, but it points the same way: say specific things that can be checked.

For its AI features, Google asks for the same things as regular search: there are no separate tricks.[1]

Step 3: let AI search engines in

The robots.txt file, at the root of your site, says which programs can read it. Many sites block every AI bot without realizing that this also shuts them out of ChatGPT and Perplexity search.

OpenAI uses two separate bots: OAI-SearchBot, which reads pages for ChatGPT search, and GPTBot, which collects data to train models. Each one is allowed or blocked separately.[3] A robots.txt that lets search in but keeps training out looks like this:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Sitemap: https://tunegocio.com/sitemap.xml

Whether you block training or not is up to you. What matters is not shutting the door on search by mistake.

Step 4: structured data

Structured data is a block of code, invisible to customers, that tells search engines what each thing is: the business name, the address, the hours, the services, the FAQs. Google uses it to understand the content of a page.[7]

For a small business, the usual approach is to mark up the type of business (for example, restaurant, hotel or store) with its address and hours, each service and the FAQs. Two rules: what the data says has to match the text people see on the page, and there's no special markup you need to appear in Google's AI features.[1]

Step 5: the llms.txt file

It's a text file at the root of your site (/llms.txt) with a summary of your business and links to your most important pages, meant to be read quickly by an AI assistant. Jeremy Howard proposed it in September 2024.[8]

Two things are worth knowing: it's an open proposal, not a standard, and Google doesn't list it among its requirements.[1] Making one takes half an hour and forces you to write down in one place what you do, where, for whom and what it costs. That clarity is useful even if no assistant ever reads it.

Step 6: if your customers speak another language

If you serve tourists or customers from other countries, some of them search in their own language, and a Spanish-only site doesn't show up in those searches. Google recommends a separate URL for each language, instead of switching it with cookies or based on the browser, and not automatically redirecting people from one language to another.[9] Each version is marked with hreflang so Google knows it's the same page in another language.[10]

Unreviewed machine translation tends to get wrong exactly what matters most: prices, dish names, cancellation policies. Have someone who speaks the language check it.

How to tell if it's working

An assistant's answers change depending on the question, the person and the day, so a screenshot proves nothing. What works is measuring the same way every month:

1. Write ten questions your customers would ask, in their own words: “where to have breakfast in Playa del Carmen with kids.”
2. Ask them every month in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google, and write down whether you show up, whether they link to you and what sources they use.
3. Add your site to Google Search Console. That's where Google counts traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode, as part of your web traffic.[1]
4. In your analytics tool, check how many visits come from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai or gemini.google.com.

Be patient with the timing: Google says crawling a page can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.[12]

Mistakes to avoid

• Believing anyone who guarantees you the top spot. Google says no one can guarantee it,[11] and no one controls what an assistant answers.
• Blocking every AI bot just in case. You shut yourself out of ChatGPT and Perplexity search.[3][4]
• Important information in a photo. Put hours and prices in text.
• Different information in each place. Your hours on Google, on your website and on Instagram have to match.
• Stuffing the page with keywords. In the GEO study it didn't improve visibility, and in some cases it made it worse.[2]
• Language versions nobody reviewed. One badly translated price makes someone writing from another country lose trust in you.