Guide Updated August 2026
How do I get my trade business to show up in ChatGPT?
ChatGPT has no submission form and sells no placement. When someone asks it for a tradie, it runs a live web search, mostly through Bing's index, and names two or three businesses from what it can read: business profiles, directories, reviews, and pages that answer plainly. Getting named starts with being readable in those places.
Written by Tyson Farrington, who runs tyso from Canberra. tyso measures this monthly: the same eight questions, put to the engines from the same city, answers written down and dated. The numbers on this page come from those runs.
How does ChatGPT pick which businesses to name?
It retrieves, it does not remember. Ask for a painter in Kambah and ChatGPT searches the web, reads what comes back, and assembles an answer out of it: directories, review sites, business profiles, the businesses' own pages. Ask the same question twice and the names can change. There is no ranked list to climb, only sources to be found in.
We measured this in August 2026. Eight tradie-marketing questions, put to Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT search from Canberra, drew citations from 89 different websites, and directories carried about a third of ChatGPT's picks. The full run is in the journal: what AI cites for tradie marketing.
What actually gets a business into AI answers?
Seven jobs, none of them exotic. Most of this is ordinary local SEO done with the reading machine in mind, which is the point: the businesses AI names are usually the ones that are easiest to verify.
Get into Bing's index
ChatGPT's search leans on Bing. A site Bing has not indexed cannot be quoted, however good it is. Register the site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit the sitemap, then search site:yourdomain.com.au on bing.com until your pages actually appear. Most trade sites have never done this.
Claim the profiles machines read
Your Google Business Profile feeds AI answers directly: name, category, hours, reviews, photos. Bing Places and Apple Business Connect are the same idea for ChatGPT and Siri. All three are free, and your competitors have almost certainly never touched the second two. Claim them and fill every field.
Make your facts agree
One business name, one phone number, one address, one line describing what you do, identical everywhere they appear: your site, your profiles, the directories. An engine that finds conflicting facts about you tends to resolve the conflict by naming somebody else.
Publish plain answers with numbers in them
Cost pages, licensing pages, how-long-does-it-take pages, each answering in its first two sentences. When we measured Canberra painting questions, the pages AI cited were cost guides that committed to numbers. ANT Painting, whose search presence tyso runs, was cited on 7 of 22 answers, most of those citations landing on one plain cost page.
Let the AI crawlers in
Robots.txt decides whether GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and their kind can read you at all. Some hosts and firewalls block them by default and never mention it, so the site passes every human check while every machine gets turned away. Test it rather than assuming it: being read is the whole game.
Earn mentions where the engines look
AI answers lean hardest on what other sites say about you: directories, best-of lists, community threads where someone genuinely helped. A mention does not need a link to count. Every place your name appears next to your trade and your suburb is one more fact in your favour.
Measure it, then measure it again
Ask the assistants what they say about you, write it down, date it, do the work, then ask again. Answers wobble between runs, so a single check proves nothing in either direction. The trend is the measurement, and it is the only honest scoreboard this field has.
How long does it take to show up?
Weeks before new pages are crawled and indexed, longer before answers move. Bing and Google both take their time with small sites, and the AI layer reads from their indexes, so it inherits the lag. The first month or two is usually plumbing: indexing, profiles, facts made to agree. The answers move after that.
Anyone promising ChatGPT visibility by next week is promising something they do not control. What can be promised is the work, the baseline, and a dated re-test.
What does tyso do about this?
This page is the service. AI search optimisation runs inside every tyso engagement rather than as a mystery add-on: the indexing, the profiles, the answer pages, the monthly measurement. And the free audit runs the probe on you before any money moves: it asks an AI assistant who it recommends in your suburb and shows you the answer, name in it or not.
The service in full is on AI search optimisation. What answer pages look like when they commit to numbers: the SEO cost guide and the website cost guide. The monthly measurement is published in the AU AI Search Watch.
Questions
How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT?
Be readable where it reads. Get your site into Bing's index, claim and fill your Google, Bing and Apple business profiles, keep your facts identical everywhere, publish pages that answer real questions plainly, and earn mentions in directories and best-of lists. Then measure what the assistants say about you and re-test after the work.
Does ChatGPT use Google or Bing?
Bing, mostly. ChatGPT's live search leans on Bing's index, Google's Gemini and AI Overviews read Google's, and Perplexity runs its own crawl alongside web search. That is why Bing Webmaster Tools, which almost nobody in the trades has ever opened, quietly matters again.
Do I have to pay OpenAI to be recommended?
No. There is no paid placement inside ChatGPT's organic answers and no submission form either. It reads the open web and quotes what holds up. Anyone selling guaranteed placement inside ChatGPT is selling something OpenAI does not offer.
Why does Bing matter when none of my customers use it?
Your customers use ChatGPT, and ChatGPT searches through Bing. Bing is also thinner ground: far fewer businesses ever show up in its index, so the ones that do are easier to find. Ten minutes in Bing Webmaster Tools puts you on ground your competitors do not know exists.
What is llms.txt and do I need to pay for one?
A small text file some sites publish to describe themselves to AI crawlers. No major engine has confirmed using it. tyso publishes one because it takes five minutes and costs nothing, which is also exactly what you should pay for one.
Does my Google Business Profile affect AI answers?
Directly. The engines read its fields: name, category, description, hours, reviews, photos. A growing share of local searches now opens with an AI answer built partly from those fields, and a thin or dormant profile reads to a machine like a business that half exists.
How do I check what ChatGPT says about my business?
Ask it the way a customer would: who should I call for a leaking roof in your suburb. Write the answer down with the date, and that is your baseline. The free tyso audit does this for you: it asks an assistant who it recommends in your area and shows you what came back before it asks for an email.
Can anyone guarantee a number one spot in ChatGPT?
No. The same question asked twice can name different businesses, so a guaranteed spot is not something anyone controls. What is real: businesses that do the work above get named more often, and dated measurement shows it moving. Guaranteed rankings belong to the people selling them.
Find out what AI says about you.
The audit asks an AI assistant who it recommends in your suburb and shows you the answer, name in it or not. Your site and your mobile speed get read on the same pass. You see the score before it asks for an email.
Rather talk it through? Book a call.