How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity?

Give the engines three things and you move from invisible to recommended: a website they can crawl and parse, a clear answer to the exact question your buyers ask, and independent sources that repeat your name. The first is technical, the second is content, the third is reputation. Skip any one and the recommendation goes to a competitor who covered all three.

Named is an Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) agency in Cape Town. We get reputation-built businesses — architects, builders, accountants, advisors and coaches — recommended by AI assistants, across South Africa, Eswatini and the rest of Southern Africa. Reach us at cydney@named.agency.

When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity "who should I hire for this?", the assistant builds the answer from a handful of sources it can read and trust. Getting recommended is a matter of being one of those sources, and of removing every reason for the engine to leave you out. Here is the order that works.

What makes an AI assistant recommend one business over another?

Three signals, in roughly this priority:

• Extractability — the page states, in plain copy near the top, what you do and who you do it for, in a form the engine can copy into its answer.
• Entity clarity — your name, category and location are consistent everywhere the engine looks, and they are present in structured data so there is no guesswork.
• Corroboration — sources the engine already trusts (directories, reviews, Google Business Profile, press) name you with the same details. One independent mention is worth more than a page of self-description.

Step 1 — Make your site machine-readable

Confirm the engines can actually fetch your pages:

• Render. If your site is built on a JavaScript framework, serve or pre-render the content so a crawler that doesn't run scripts still reads your services and location. View the page source; if it's an empty shell, that is the first fix.
• robots.txt. Permit the crawlers that matter — training, search indexing, and the live user-fetch agents each engine uses at answer time. Blocking any tier quietly removes you from that engine's answers.
• Schema. Add Organization or LocalBusiness structured data with your name, category, contact and area served, so the model reads your identity as data, not prose.

Step 2 — Answer the question on the page

Write the page the way the buyer asks the question. For every question that matters — "best AEO agency in Cape Town", "AEO vs SEO", "is this worth paying for" — there should be a page with that question as the heading and a short, direct answer underneath. Put the answer first and the background second. The engine usually lifts the first clean passage it finds; give it one worth lifting.

Step 3 — Get named somewhere other than your own site

This is the step most businesses skip, and it is the one that moves the engines that answer from memory. In Named's own June 2026 baseline test, 40% of the names AI assistants gave came from the model's memory rather than a live citation — meaning they recalled businesses that independent sources had repeated often enough to stick. To earn that:

• Claim and fully complete your Google Business Profile.
• Get listed in the directories the engines actually cite — for Southern African service businesses that means DesignRush, Clutch and TechBehemoths, among others.
• Collect reviews that name the service and the result, not just a star rating.
• Earn mentions in trade press, podcasts and interviews. Repetition across independent sources is what a memory-based engine rewards over time.

Do the different engines work the same way?

No, and the differences change your priorities:

• ChatGPT and Perplexity browse live and cite sources, so a crawlable site and strong directory listings reach them fastest.
• Google's AI Overviews and Gemini lean on Google's index and Business Profiles, so your Google Business Profile and on-page location signals carry extra weight.
• Claude answers more from memory, so it is the slowest to change and the most dependent on independent mentions building up.

A business that fixes only its own site will start to show in the browsing engines while staying invisible in the memory-based ones. You need both halves.

How do I know if it's working?

Measure it. Pick the exact questions your buyers ask, run them across all four engines, and record who gets named — that is your baseline. Re-run the same set after the work ships and compare. Movement off zero, even a single named mention on one engine, is the signal the fixes are landing. Named's Report Card runs this test for you and dates the baseline so the change is provable, not a guess.

Author: Cydney Chambers, founder of Named Agency · Updated: 21 June 2026

Sources: Named AI Visibility baseline test, 18 June 2026 (provenance: 40% model memory); Google Q2 2025 earnings; Pew Research Center, 2025.