How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Google AI and other assistants

Something changed in the way people find businesses, and most Bahamian companies have not noticed yet. A visitor planning a trip asks ChatGPT "where should I eat in George Town". A homeowner asks Google "who does AC repair in Freeport" and gets an AI answer at the top of the page before any links. A buyer asks Perplexity "how do I buy property in the Bahamas as a foreigner" and gets a summary with three sources.

Those answers come from somewhere. They come from websites that made it easy for the assistant to understand and trust them. This is often called generative engine optimisation, or GEO. The name is new. The work is mostly good sense.

How AI assistants choose who to mention

An assistant does not browse like a person. It reads text, looks for clear statements of fact, checks them against other sources, and prefers pages that answer the question directly. It cannot read the text inside an image. It is suspicious of claims that appear nowhere else. It gives more weight to pages that are specific about place.

So the businesses that get recommended tend to share a few things:

• Their website says plainly what they do, where, for whom and at what price
• The same name, address and phone appear on the site, on Google, on Facebook and everywhere else
• Their pages answer the questions people ask, in sentences that can be quoted
• The site is open to AI crawlers and loads quickly
• Other sites mention them: directories, reviews, local news, partners

None of that is a trick. It is what a well-run business website should have had all along.

1. State the facts in text, not pictures

If your menu is a photo, your prices are in an image, and your hours are in a graphic from Canva, AI assistants see nothing. Put them in real text on the page. The same goes for your address, your phone number, your services and your opening hours.

2. Answer questions directly

Think about what someone would ask about your business and answer it in a sentence that stands on its own. "Harbour Grill is open Tuesday to Sunday from 11am to 10pm in Nassau and takes reservations on WhatsApp." An assistant can quote that. "We are passionate about hospitality" it cannot use.

A frequently-asked-questions section, with one plain answer per question, is one of the most effective things you can add, because the answers are already in the shape an assistant needs.

3. Keep your details identical everywhere

Your business name, address and phone number should match exactly on your website, Google Business Profile, Facebook, Instagram, TripAdvisor, the Yellow Pages and any directory. "Harbour Grill" on one and "Harbour Grill Restaurant & Bar" on another, or two different phone numbers, make an assistant less sure which is right and less likely to cite you.

4. Add structured data

Structured data is a block of code on each page, invisible to visitors, that labels your business for machines: this is a restaurant, here is its address, here are its hours, here is its price range, here are the frequently asked questions. Search engines have used it for years; AI assistants lean on it heavily. A good web developer adds it as a matter of course. Ask yours whether your site has schema.org markup. If they do not know what that is, that is your answer.

5. Let the crawlers in

Every website has a small file called robots.txt that tells crawlers what they may read. Some hosting companies and security plugins block AI crawlers by default. If yours does, you are invisible to the assistants no matter how good the site is. Ask for ChatGPT's, Google's, Anthropic's and Perplexity's crawlers to be allowed. A newer convention, a file called llms.txt, gives assistants a plain-text summary of your site; it costs nothing to add.

6. Be specific about place

"Boat charters in The Bahamas" competes with every operator in the country. "Half-day boat charters from Staniel Cay to the swimming pigs, departing 9am and 1pm" is something an assistant can match to a specific question. Name your island, your settlement, your landmarks, the islands you serve.

7. Get mentioned elsewhere

Assistants trust a business that other sources confirm. Reviews on Google and TripAdvisor, a listing in the local directories, a mention on your island's tourism page, a partner's website linking to you. Each one is a vote that you exist and are what you say you are.

8. Keep it fast and current

A page that times out does not get read. A page with last year's prices gets quoted with last year's prices. Speed and upkeep matter here for the same reasons they matter to a human visitor.

What this means for your website

Most Bahamian business sites fail on points one, three, four and five without anyone knowing. The fix is a site built with text the machines can read, facts that match everywhere, structured data on every page, and the crawlers let in. Then a few well-written pages that answer the questions your customers actually ask.

That is how every 7-Day Bold Rebuild is built, including this site. If you would like to see what yours would look like done this way, send it over.