To Get Recommended by ChatGPT, You Have to Win Bing (Not Just Google)
Most local businesses optimize for Google and ignore Bing. That's exactly why they're invisible in ChatGPT. Here's the connection, and how to fix it.
Here is something almost no local business owner knows. When ChatGPT recommends a business, it is not browsing the live web the way you picture it. It mostly pulls from a search index, and that index is built largely on Bing. Independent analysis found that about 87% of the businesses ChatGPT cites also rank in Bing's top ten results. Source: Seer Interactive, 2026.
We saw the same thing in our own testing. Behind the scenes, ChatGPT runs Bing-style searches and leans on current review counts and profile data that can only come from an index, not from memory.
The takeaway is simple and a little uncomfortable: your ChatGPT visibility is mostly your Bing visibility. And almost everyone pours all their effort into Google while leaving Bing completely untouched.
What this means for you
- Get indexed in Bing. Submit your sitemap through Bing Webmaster Tools and confirm your key pages are actually indexed.
- Do not accidentally block the door. Make sure your site does not block the crawler that builds ChatGPT's search index.
- Use plain, exact wording. Say "auto body shop in [city]," not something clever.
- Keep your facts machine-readable. Use plain text, not copy buried in images.
None of this is glamorous. That's the point. While everyone else fights over Google, the path into ChatGPT runs through a door most businesses forgot existed.