how to get your business recommended by chatgpt: check first

every guide to how to get your business recommended by chatgpt starts with the fixes: structured data, reviews, a clearer about page. none of them starts where you should, which is finding out what the ai says about your market today.

so we did that for underway first. we wrote the ten questions our buyers would ask an assistant, put them to chatgpt and claude with their web search on, and read every answer. underway was named in none of them. not once in sixteen answers. the tools they pointed at instead were editors, schedulers and podcast apps.

that number is the reason this exists, and the reason it is now in underway for you.

check before you fix anything

an ai assistant answers a question by searching, reading a handful of pages and naming what those pages name. if you are not named, there is a specific reason: no page answers that question plainly, or the pages that do never mention you. you cannot fix that in general. you fix it question by question.

• write the questions a buyer would ask an assistant before they know you exist: the best tool for their job, how to do the job, alternatives to the name they already know.
• never put your own name in the question. the point is whether it names you unprompted.
• ask each one of more than one assistant, with web search on, because each searches differently.
• for every answer, note three things: were you named, was one of your pages a source, and who was named instead.
• do it again every week, because the answers change as the web does.

how to get your business recommended by chatgpt, one question at a time

once you know which questions you lose, the fix is usually a page. a plain page on your own site that answers that exact question, in the words someone would ask it, naming what you do and for whom. assistants quote pages that answer the question. they rarely quote a homepage that answers nothing in particular.

the second fix is being mentioned where the assistant already looks: the comparison articles, forum threads and review sites it cited when it named someone else. the sources it used are the list of places to be.

for a founder documenting a build, there is a third. every public episode on underway has its own page with the video and, under it, what was said written up and checked. a page like that, about a real problem in your own words, is exactly the kind of thing these answers cite.

what underway does now

promote has a new choice, found in ai answers, part of series.

• it writes ten questions from your marketing brief, the ones your buyers would ask, without your name in them. change the questions whenever you like, up to fifteen.
• every week it asks each of them of chatgpt and claude, and google's gemini where it can be reached, with their web search on.
• each answer is read for whether it names you, your product or your series, whether your site or your page on underway was a source, and which competitors or sites it pointed to instead.
• the page opens on one number, named in so many of so many answers, with the change on the week before, and a row per question showing each assistant's verdict.
• easy wins sit at the top: a question an assistant answered by pointing somewhere else, and not at you. those also come through as next steps on today.

like every number in underway, it is shown to you and never given to the interviewer. what you are asked on camera comes from your day, not from what an ai happened to say about your market.

the same page is on the phone under promote.

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