How to get your Charleston business recommended by ChatGPT

What OpenAI says the search does

The help article “Searching the web with ChatGPT” says ChatGPT can search the web and can use location information to find local results, including restaurants, news, and weather. Responses that use web search may include citations. The same article says search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect, and that you should open the cited source. It also says ChatGPT may use an approximate location from the IP address, and that device location sharing is optional and off by default. OpenAI Help, Searching the web with ChatGPT.

For restaurants, that article says ChatGPT can show reservation times from OpenTable, Resy, or Yelp, depending on the restaurant, and that availability varies. OpenTable is described as global, Resy as available in the United States, and Yelp as available in the United States and Canada. A retail shop does not get a Reserve button from that paragraph. Restaurant examples on this site are on AI for restaurants in Charleston.

What makes a site eligible

The same help article says: “To make a website eligible for inclusion, allow OAI-Searchbot to crawl the site and confirm that the website host or content delivery network allows traffic from OpenAI’s published searchbot IP addresses.” Eligibility is not placement. OpenAI’s crawler overview says OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT’s search features, and that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. It says GPTBot is a separate crawler, used for content that may train models, and that the two settings are independent. It also says a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to adjust. OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers.

The Playbook’s robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot. That is a fact about this site. It is not evidence that ChatGPT will cite any page here.

What you can update this week

Google’s help page says that when you add and verify a Business Profile, customers can find the business on Search and Maps, and that you can add or claim it at no charge. That is Google’s system, not ChatGPT’s. Hours, the address, and the services you actually offer are the facts a person, or a citation, can check. Add or claim your Business Profile.

Put those facts on your own site in sentences a customer would ask. “Do you repair heat pumps in West Ashley?” needs a page that answers it. A draft prompt for the Google description is Google Business Profile description. The free-chat comparison is free AI tools for Charleston shops.

If you sell an “AI-powered” service, the FTC’s February 27, 2023 business post says a performance claim can be deceptive if it lacks support, and that calling a product AI-powered needs to match what the product does. FTC, Keep your AI claims in check.