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How ChatGPT picks businesses
When a customer asks ChatGPT who to call, it names two or three businesses and says a sentence about each. Here is where those names come from, why they change between askings, and what makes yours more likely to be one of them.
What happens when a customer asks
Ask ChatGPT a local question, "who are the best dentists in Bristol", and it does not look you up in a directory. It runs a web search, reads a handful of the pages it finds, and writes a fresh answer from what it just read. The answer usually carries a few names, each with a reason attached.
Here is the shape of one. The business is made up; the shape is real.
Who are the best dentists in Bristol?
Bristol has a lot of well reviewed practices, so "best" depends on what you need. For general and family dentistry, the ones that come up most often are Queen Square Dental Practice (city centre, strong reviews for check ups and hygiene), Clifton Smile Dental (Clifton, popular for cosmetic work) and Redland Dental Practice (family run, praised for nervous patients).
Notice what the reasons are: reviews, a neighbourhood, what each practice is known for. ChatGPT read that somewhere. It always reads it somewhere.
Where the names come from
ChatGPT's web search reads Bing's index of the web. That one fact explains a lot of what gets picked and what stays invisible:
- If Bing has none of your pages, ChatGPT cannot find you. Not as a punishment; it simply searches an index you are not in. This is why a PicksYou check asks Bing how many of your pages it holds.
- The local "best of" pages carry the most weight. Assistants pull names from "best dentists in Bristol" style articles before anywhere else. If those pages list you, you are in the material the answer is written from.
- Review language gets quoted back. The sentence ChatGPT writes about a business is usually assembled from its reviews and listings, which is why well reviewed businesses get both named and described well.
- Your own site counts when it is readable. ChatGPT can only connect your site to your name if your homepage states who you are in a form software can read without guessing, and if your robots.txt lets the AI crawlers in.
Why the names change between askings
The answer is written fresh every time, so it moves. Ask the same question twice and the second answer can name a different mix of businesses. Phrasing, the day, and where the asker is all shift it.
That has a hard consequence: one screenshot tells you almost nothing. Seeing your name once does not mean customers see it; missing once does not mean you are invisible. The only honest reading is a count over many askings: out of this many answers, this many named you, and a stated range for how much of that is luck.
How PicksYou measures it
We ask ChatGPT through the official OpenAI interface with web search on, the same questions a new customer would ask for your trade in your town. The exact question we sent is stored beside each answer, and every answer is stored word for word, so you never take our word for anything. On the weekly plans each question is asked more than once, because one reading of a thing this variable is not a measurement.
Then we read the answers for your name. When a match is not obvious, a person checks before it counts: an uncertain match is never called a hit, so your count can be behind the truth but never ahead of it.
What you can honestly do
Work on the material ChatGPT reads: get onto the best-of pages for your trade, earn and answer reviews, make your homepage state who you are in a readable form, let the AI crawlers in, and make sure Bing holds your pages. A PicksYou report checks each of these for your business and says which ones are in your way.
And keep the one warning in mind: Anyone who sells you a position in an AI answer is selling a number they invented. There is no list inside ChatGPT to be number three of. Make yourself readable, then measure. The full method is public: How we measure.