AI Search
How ChatGPT Decides What Businesses to Recommend
An inside look at the signals that determine whether AI systems cite your brand or a competitor's when customers ask for recommendations.
By AI Search Consultant Team
An inside look at the signals that determine whether AI systems cite your brand or a competitor's when customers ask for recommendations.
By AI Search Consultant Team
When a potential customer types “who is the best [your service] in [your city]?” into ChatGPT, the AI doesn’t flip a coin. It makes a calculated decision based on a web of signals that most businesses have never thought about.
Understanding those signals is the first step to being the business ChatGPT recommends.
ChatGPT and similar large language models are trained on vast amounts of internet data. But their real-time recommendation capabilities come from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): the ability to pull in current information from trusted sources to answer questions accurately.
The businesses that get recommended are the ones whose information appears consistently, authoritatively, and accurately across the sources AI systems trust.
Here’s what that means in practice.
AI systems build models of the world through “entities”: people, places, organisations, products, and concepts. Your business becomes a recognised entity when information about it appears consistently across multiple authoritative sources.
This includes:
When an AI system encounters your brand name in a query, it checks whether it has sufficient entity data to confidently recommend you. If your entity footprint is thin or inconsistent, you get passed over.
AI systems don’t just recognise entities. They understand which entities are authorities on which topics.
If your website consistently publishes high-quality content on a specific topic, and that content is referenced or linked to by credible external sources, AI systems begin to associate your brand with expertise in that area.
This is why content strategy matters more than ever. Not content for content’s sake, but carefully crafted material that demonstrates deep expertise on the exact questions your customers ask.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews all have sophisticated mechanisms for evaluating source credibility. They look at:
A business mentioned positively in a Forbes article, a well-regarded industry blog, and several case studies on partner sites will be far more likely to receive AI recommendations than a business with an identical website but no external validation.
AI systems incorporate review data from Google, Trustpilot, G2, and similar platforms. High-volume, positive reviews on credible platforms signal that a business consistently delivers on its promises.
Importantly, it’s not just the star rating. The content of reviews matters. Reviews that mention specific services, outcomes, and experiences give AI systems the vocabulary to recommend you in context.
Schema markup on your website tells AI systems exactly what your business does, where it operates, what it offers, and how to contact you. Businesses without proper schema are harder for AI to accurately represent.
This is especially important for:
The businesses that will win the AI search era are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most website traffic. They’re the ones that build a coherent, authoritative, well-documented presence across all the signals AI systems use.
That means consistent entity data, topical authority through quality content, third-party validation, strong review profiles, and clean structured data.
The good news: this is eminently achievable. And the businesses that start now will build a substantial head start over competitors who haven’t noticed the shift yet.
If you want to know exactly where your business stands in AI search today, book a free strategy call. We’ll audit your current AI visibility and show you the specific gaps and opportunities.
Book a free strategy call. We'll audit your AI search visibility and show you exactly what to do next.
Book a free strategy call