Why ChatGPT does not recommend your business

Your clients have started asking their questions somewhere else. Instead of typing « plumber Laval » and comparing ten links, they ask an assistant who they should call for water damage in Laval, and they get two or three names back. If yours is not among them, you are not ranked badly: you are absent from the answer.

What we measured

In August 2026 we put 18 real buying questions to the answer engines, the kind a client asks before calling anybody. All 18 answers named specific companies, with their town, and several went as far as quoting the licence number. Not one settled for telling the client to look for a contractor nearby.

In other words, these answers are not generalities. They are recommendations by name, and somebody is in them instead of you.

Why some companies come out and others do not

An answer engine does not walk your site the way a visitor does. It looks for information it can repeat without getting it wrong: what you do, where you do it, how to reach you, at what price. When that information is only drawn on a page, it has to guess. When the information is declared in the page's code, it no longer has to.

That is what came out most sharply in our reading. Among the companies compared, those whose site declares its local business identity in a machine readable format showed up in about 40% of the answers, against a little under 14% for the rest. The gap does not come from the visible content, which looks much the same from one site to the next. It comes from what the page says about itself.

The false remedy going around

For the past year a file named llms.txt has been presented almost everywhere as the way to get cited by AI. We checked: in our reading, its presence has no measurable link to being cited. One very widespread website platform generates it automatically for 94% of its customers, who are not cited any more because of it.

It does no harm, it simply does nothing. Putting one in place takes ten minutes; selling it as a lever is another matter.

What actually changes something

• Declare your business inside the code of your pages. Name, town, area served, phone, email, services, prices when you show them. It is the sharpest lever we measured.
• Answer the real questions, in plain words. A page that deals explicitly with what it costs, or how long it takes, gets cited, because it holds an answer that can be lifted as it stands.
• Be named somewhere other than your own site. Mentions of your business on other sites weigh more than links do in these engines. A trade directory, an association, local coverage.
• Let the right crawlers in. The ones feeding the answers are not the ones training the models. You can welcome the first and refuse the second.

Where to start

Ask the five questions your clients would ask yourself, in two different assistants, and note who comes out. It is free and takes twenty minutes. If your name appears nowhere, the problem is almost always structural before it is editorial. Correcting that structure is a job on its own, and we do it as one: AI visibility, audited free before anything is decided.

A site built to be read by those engines declares all of it from day one, and keeps declaring it as your services change: that is what SiteForge does. If you would rather know what it is worth at your place before committing to anything, the diagnostic puts a number on the job before starting it.