How to appear in ChatGPT when somebody asks about your business

Why this is no longer the same as SEO

When somebody searched Google they saw twenty links and picked one. When they ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity, they get an answer with three or four proper names, and the decision ends right there. There is no second page to appear on.

SEO measures your position in a list of links. This is a different thing: it is whether your name sits inside the paragraph the AI writes. You can rank well on Google and not exist in that answer, because they are not decided the same way.

AI does not invent who to recommend, it repeats what it read

This is the part that changes everything. An assistant has no opinion about your bakery. It builds the answer out of what it found written about businesses like yours: your site, the directories you are listed in, your reviews, and the articles and roundups that mention you.

So the question is not how to persuade the AI. It is what the AI will read when somebody asks, and whether your business is in there in a form it can use.

The five facts that have to be in plain text

Start with your own site, because it is the only thing you fully control. It needs to say, in text that can be read and not inside an image: what you sell, which city and area, your hours, your phone number and your address.

That sounds obvious. It is almost never there. Plenty of local business sites have the phone number only in a header image and the city nowhere at all, because the owner assumes everybody knows where they are.

A quick test: open your homepage, select the text with your mouse, and paste it into a notes app. Whatever did not come across, the AI did not read either.

Say it in the same sentence your customer would use

The AI looks for matches between the question and what it read. If a customer asks about a bakery in Guadalajara and your site says only your business name and the word Welcome, there is nothing to match.

Write the whole sentence somewhere visible on your homepage: the trade and the city together, the way a person would say them.

Artisan bakery in Guadalajara, Jalisco.
Sourdough bread, baked twice a day.
Open Monday to Saturday, 9:00 to 19:00.
Av. Ejemplo 123, Americana. Phone 33 1234 5678.

Claim the directories the AI is already citing

Assistants cite sources, and for local businesses those sources are almost always the same handful: Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Foursquare. Every site where you have no profile is a place they quote your competitors from instead of you.

Use exactly the same name, address and phone number on all of them. When they disagree, the AI treats them as different businesses and fully trusts none of them.

Old reviews carry little weight

A review from fourteen months ago tells the AI your business existed fourteen months ago. Ten fresh reviews move more than a hundred flyers, and owner replies get read and quoted too.

When you reply to a review, name what you sell and the area in two lines. That is new text, in your words, that the AI can repeat later.

The two files you add once and never touch again

The first is JSON-LD, also called structured data: a block of code in your site's header that states your name, address and hours in a format machines read without guessing.

The second is llms.txt, a plain text file at the root of your site that summarises your business for AI crawlers. It is new, it is cheap, and adoption is growing fast. Ten lines is enough.

Whoever manages your site can add both in about fifteen minutes each, and then they keep working.

Do it in both languages if your customers ask in both

The AI answers in the language it was asked in, and looks for sources in that language. If your site only exists in English, there is nothing of yours to name in Spanish, and the other way round.

For a business in Mexico with customers coming from the United States, or a Hispanic business in the United States, being visible in one language and invisible in the other means losing half the market without noticing.

How to know whether any of this worked

The problem with everything above is that you cannot see it. The sale that never arrived because the AI named somebody else leaves no trace in your analytics: the customer never knows, and neither do you.

The only way to measure it is to ask. Put the questions a buyer would ask to each assistant, and count how many answers your name appears in. That is exactly what the free Bienvisto scan does: sixteen questions, eight in Spanish and eight in English, and a score from 0 to 100 with the numbers in plain sight.

Changes are not immediate. Assistants re-read your site over days or weeks. What does change quickly is accuracy: once they name you, they stop getting your hours and your area wrong.