Someone in your suburb just opened ChatGPT and typed "best plumber near me" or "who should I use for a bathroom renovation in Sydney". They did not open Google. They did not scroll past three ads.
They got a short list of names. If you were not on it, you did not exist for that customer.
This is the fastest moving change in how businesses get found in a decade, and almost nobody in Australian SMB land is doing anything about it. Here is how it works and what you can do.
How AI models actually decide who to name
There are three separate mechanisms, and they matter in different ways.
1. What the model learned during training. Large models absorbed a snapshot of the web. If your business was well represented across the web at that point, you may get named from memory. You cannot change the past, but you can change what the next snapshot contains.
2. What the model retrieves live. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews all search the web in real time for current or local questions. This is the one you can influence quickly. They pull a handful of sources, read them, and synthesise an answer.
3. What the model can access at all. If your site blocks AI crawlers, you are invisible to mechanism two by definition. A surprising number of businesses have quietly done this without knowing, often through a default setting in a hosting platform or a well meaning security plugin.
The seven things that actually move the needle
1. Check you are not blocking AI crawlers
Open yoursite.com.au/robots.txt. Look for entries blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended or CCBot. If they are there, you have opted out of being recommended. This is a five minute fix and it is the first thing we check in an AI strategy audit.
2. Be present where the models look
AI models do not primarily read your homepage. They read the sources that talk about you. That means directories, review platforms, industry associations, local news, supplier listings and forums. A business with a beautiful website and no third party presence is hard for a model to verify and therefore risky to recommend.
3. Make your facts unambiguous and consistent
Your business name, address, phone number, service area and services need to be identical everywhere they appear. Models are pattern matchers. Inconsistent information reads as low confidence, and low confidence information does not get repeated in an answer.
This matters more than usual if your business name is similar to others, because the model may simply merge you with a competitor or hedge and name neither of you.
4. Answer questions directly, in the format the model wants to quote
Models cite passages that answer a question cleanly and self containedly. A page that buries the answer in paragraph nine of a rambling narrative will not get cited. A page with a clear question as a heading and a direct two sentence answer underneath will.
That structure is why this article, and every other article on this site, is built the way it is.
5. Structured data
Schema markup for LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage and Review gives the model machine readable facts rather than making it infer them from prose. It reduces ambiguity, which is the whole game. This sits alongside conventional search work, which is why we treat it as part of SEO and content rather than a separate discipline.
6. Reviews, and the substance in them
Volume matters, recency matters, but what actually gets surfaced is the content. A review that says "great job" is useless to a model. A review that says "replaced our hot water system in Marrickville the same day we called" is a fact the model can use to answer a specific question. Ask customers what they had done and where. Do not script them, just prompt the specifics.
7. Have something specific to be recommended for
This is the uncomfortable one. Models recommend the specific over the generic, because a specific claim answers the question better. "Sydney builder" competes with two thousand others. "Heritage terrace restoration in the Inner West" competes with a handful. If your positioning is generic, the model has no reason to select you, and neither does the customer.
What this is not
It is not a hack. There is no keyword to stuff, no directory to spam, no prompt to inject. People selling "guaranteed ChatGPT rankings" are selling nothing, because there is no ranking to buy. The models are synthesising from whatever the web says about you, and the only durable strategy is to make the web say clear, consistent, specific, verifiable things about you.
Which is, awkwardly, just good business hygiene with a new name attached.
What to do this week
Go and ask. Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Type the question your best customer would type. See who gets named.
If it is your competitors, you now know exactly what you are working against, and you can read their site and see what they are doing that you are not.
If nobody gets named and the model gives a generic answer, that is an opening.
We run this as part of our audit process, including the robots.txt check, the consistency check across your listings, and a review of how the models currently describe your business and your competitors. If you want it done properly, book an audit or email hello@orvxai.com.
FAQ
How do I get AI to recommend my business?
Make sure AI crawlers are not blocked in your robots.txt, keep your business details consistent everywhere they appear, build presence on the third party sources models read, use structured data, and answer common customer questions directly on your site in a format models can quote.
Can I pay to appear in ChatGPT recommendations?
No. There is no paid placement in the recommendation itself. Models synthesise from what the open web says about you, which is why consistency and third party presence matter more than advertising spend.
Does SEO still matter if people use AI search?
Yes, more than ever in some ways, because the models retrieve live web results to answer current and local questions. The difference is that the goal shifts from ranking a page to being the source a model chooses to quote.
How do I know if my site is blocked from AI crawlers?
Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for rules disallowing GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, CCBot or Google-Extended. If they are present, AI tools cannot read your site.
Want to know how AI describes your business right now?
ORVX AI runs the full check as part of our audit: crawler access, listing consistency, and how the models currently answer your customers' questions.
Book a Free Discovery Call →