How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business
Are you a business owner who wants to know how to get clients from ChatGPT? You’re not alone. The great news is that it’s not super hard to do what it takes to start showing up in AI Search and getting ChatGPT, Claude, and others to recommend your business.
In this post, I’m going to use coaching as the example, but I have students and clients in many different niches who are having the same success with AI Search. Take the coaching example and think about how it applies to your specific business. The strategies are all the same; it’s just going to be adjusting the content to fit your niche.
Several of my students and clients are life coaches, and they’re getting coaching clients from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others, and they’re making thousands of dollars because ChatGPT and the other AI Search Engines are recommending them as coaches.
Let’s start with how it works, and then we’ll go into what you need to do on your site to help get ChatGPT to recommend you as a coach. I’ll also touch on other things you can do to improve your chances of showing up in AI Search and what doesn’t actually help, even though it seems like it might. I want you to understand what it takes to show up in AI Search so you can get clients from ChatGPT and other AI Search Engines too.
How Jane got a coaching client from ChatGPT
Someone typed a question into ChatGPT: How do I explain binge eating to my partner? ChatGPT didn't just answer; within the answer, it recommended a podcast episode on that exact topic. The podcast episode was all about how to explain binge eating to your partner that my student Jane had recorded for her audience.
Why ChatGPT Recommended Jane’s podcast to the searcher
It wasn’t a coincidence that ChatGPT recommended Jane’s podcast episode on explaining binge eating to your partner to the searcher. Jane’s been through both Simple Podcast SEO and my group SEO coaching program for entrepreneurs, Simple SEO Content, so she knew exactly what questions to answer and how to help her blog, website, and podcast all be found in Google and AI Search.
The searcher listened to Jane’s podcast based on ChatGPT’s recommendations and found that she fell in love with Jane. She listened to a few more episodes, found her content super helpful, visited the website, scheduled a consult call, and when it was time for the call, her top question was, “when can I start?”. She didn’t even ask how much it cost because she’d already researched that part and knew what it cost to work with Jane 1:1 and knew that she wanted to do it.
That’s not a lucky break or a new client falling from the sky. That's what it looks like when AI search actually works for a coach, and it's happening more than most people realize. If you aren’t getting clients from AI search yet and you want to, then I want to help you.
How does ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overviews, or another AI Search decide who to recommend?
AI Search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and others find information from multiple sources and use that to help create an answer that they believe answers the searcher’s question. They search Google, they have their own indexed information, they search review sites, they look at social media profiles (not a huge focus for them, but they do look), they look at your website, they check other websites to see what they say about the subject, they check podcast apps, and more. They use the information available to create as complete a picture as possible so they can provide value and answer the searcher’s question.
What can you do to help ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or other AI Search Engines recommend your business to coaching clients?
If you want AI Search like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI, or others to recommend your business, then you need to be sure you’re creating content (blog posts, website pages, podcast episodes, things the AI search engines can find and understand) that answers the questions people are asking in their chats. You have to make sure you’re creating the type of content that the search engines want to share with people. Generic content that doesn’t really tell them much and doesn’t help them won’t help you. It’s important to create what Google has termed Non-Commodity Content. I wrote a post on this recently. You can read it here to get a better understanding of what type of content you should be creating for your audience.
If your website isn’t showing up in AI Search when people look for coaches, and your competitors are, it can be very frustrating, and there are things you can do about it.
How to help your coaching website show up in AI Search
To show up in AI Search, you need to make sure your site can be found and understood by AI Search Engines like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others. You have to do things on your site to boost visibility; it doesn’t happen automatically.
One of the most important things you can do to help your coaching website show up in AI Search is to create content that your ideal customer is searching for. Think about the people you coach: what do they struggle with? What questions do they have that you can help them with?
Start by brainstorming 5-10 questions that your ideal customer asks you all the time. Think about the question and create a separate blog post for each one. You don’t want to answer 2-3 questions in the same post; it’s better to keep them separate and focus on one question per post.
Think about the reader, answer the question thoroughly, and provide insights and information that only you have that can help them. Make sure your post is more engaging and informational than an AI summary would be.
I recently wrote a blog post on how to show up in AI Search that goes into more detail and gives additional tips. You might find it helpful. You can read it here. https://www.etchedmarketing.com/blog/how-to-show-up-in-ai-search
If you want to also show up in Google Search, you’ll want to choose an SEO keyword that your website has a good chance of ranking for and use that in the places Google looks for clues as to what your page is about. I have a Beginner’s Guide to SEO that walks you through where to use your keyword. You can request a copy of it here. https://www.etchedmarketing.com/landing/beginners-seo-guide
Where else do you want to show up in order to get coaching clients from AI Search?
The way AI Search works, it doesn’t just pull information from your website; it pulls it from other ones too. If you are talked about on other websites, included in directories or best-of lists, that can help too. If you have a Google Business Profile with positive reviews on it, that can also help boost your AI Search visibility. Podcast interviews can help you because other websites talk about your business and cite you. With traditional SEO, you really need another website to link to your site, but with AI Search, they’re looking to see if other people are talking about you and what they’re saying. How others view your business online matters.
AI Search does look at sites like Substack and LinkedIn, but it doesn’t review most social media sites. It can share podcast episodes based on the titles, transcripts, and show notes pages.
What doesn’t help you show up in AI Search?
AI Search Engines don’t look at your Facebook profile, posts in social media groups, or things like that to find information. They’re not going to be able to access any information that’s behind a login, so if you’ve shared great information but it’s password-protected, or you have to enter your email address to get access, AI won’t be able to do that. AI Search also can’t read what’s in your pop-ups, photos, or videos.
If you’re wondering why your competition is showing up and not you, this blog post goes into that. It can help explain more. https://www.etchedmarketing.com/blog/why-other-businesses-show-up-in-ai-search-instead-of-you
Katie got a client from ChatGPT and made thousands of dollars
Katie is another coach who I work with. She’s both a coach and also has a life coach certification program where she certifies new life coaches. She’s amazing and has been in business for years. She recently got a new student for her life coaching certification program directly from a ChatGPT recommendation. The new student wanted to become a life coach and asked ChatGPT to help her research options and recommend the best certification program for her. ChatGPT recommended several coaching certification programs, and Katie’s was one of them. She visited Katie’s website and found lots of great, helpful information all about her certification program. She met with Katie and signed up to get certified to become a life coach.
How did Katie get the new coaching client from ChatGPT?
You may be thinking, great story, Rachel, but how do I take this and apply it to my coaching business? What I want you to understand is why ChatGPT recommended Katie’s program in the first place.
Katie has a great website that’s full of information that’s helpful to her ideal coaching clients. Her site is optimized for Google and AI Search both. She’s done SEO and AI SEO. She has a dedicated page for her coaching certification. That page is SEO and AI SEO friendly. She’s got a keyword her site has a good chance of ranking for; it’s being used in all the right places. She’s also done her AI SEO work and has added and answered a bunch of the questions her ideal coaching client asks when they’re trying to decide about signing up for a certification program.
Beyond her website, Katie has been interviewed on many podcasts, and there are other sites that talk about her programs. She’s also active on Substack, and she’s worked on her digital footprint.
Katie didn’t get that coaching certification client by accident; she got it through the SEO and AI SEO work that we did together. And it paid off, she’s made back more than she spent to learn what to do on her website.
What do you need to do to have ChatGPT recommend your business?
FAQ about getting ChatGPT to recommend your business
Can ChatGPT really recommend a specific business by name?
Yes, ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI Search Tools recommend businesses by name all the time. If you do AI SEO on your site and have the answers to the questions people are asking in AI Search, you have a better chance of getting recommended to people who are searching for help.
Do I need a podcast to get recommended by ChatGPT?
You don’t need a podcast in order to show up in AI Search. You do need content of some sort that the AI Search Engine can read and understand. You can choose to have that information on your website pages, blog posts, or podcast show notes pages. It’s up to you. What matters more is that you have the answers to the questions people are asking in search.
How is getting recommended by ChatGPT different from ranking on Google?
Here, you’re trying to be included in the answer, with a link back to your site (sometimes). With Google SEO, you’re trying to get your website to show up on the first page of sites that are listed. As far as how the two work, in my experience, AI SEO works much faster than Google SEO. I’ve personally had my site be recommended by AI Search within a week of creating new content to answer a specific question. Google often takes a few months to start showing up high in the search results.
How long does it take to start showing up in AI Search?
I personally have had a new blog post start showing up in AI Search on both Google AI and ChatGPT within less than a week. My fastest so far are the posts on how to show up in AI Search and why your competitor shows up in AI Search instead of you. Both of these posts started showing up in Google AI Overviews and being cited by ChatGPT within 5 days. They also both started getting search traffic within that same 5-day timeframe. I still find it amazing to see it work so fast.
I'm a newer business with a small following. Can this still work for me?
Absolutely. You won’t have the large footprint of a more established business, but that doesn’t mean that this can’t work for your business. If you want ChatGPT, Google AI, Claude, and other AI Search Tools to recommend you to new clients, you need to get started now. The longer you wait, the more competition there will be. We’re still in the early days of AI Search.
![[Image Goes Here]](https://etchedmarketing-limited.s3.amazonaws.com/5j8tr77xit7ni182m1wfyfq7xqoh?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3D%22cover-%20Beginners%20Guide%20to%20%20AI%20SEO%20Etched%20Marketing%20Academy.jpg%22%3B%20filename%2A%3DUTF-8%27%27cover-%2520Beginners%2520Guide%2520to%2520%2520AI%2520SEO%2520Etched%2520Marketing%2520Academy.jpg&response-content-type=image%2Fjpeg&x-amz-checksum-mode=ENABLED&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAQB7BGL2Y4EVBGLYX%2F20261002%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20261002T082604Z&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=1e4361a6aadee5af4639179f66488f65f4a030d0ce2781e6475ff633b7ffe7e4)