ChatGPT recommends businesses by turning your question into web searches. It then names the few places that show up again and again across the results: directories, review sites, news and the businesses' own pages. Being named matters more now. On September 21, 2026, PPC Land reported on court filings against OpenAI and Microsoft. One filing says 87.78% of ChatGPT users visit no outside website during a search, compared with 26.91% on Google.
So if ChatGPT doesn't name you, most of its users never see you. Those who click are further along. In a separate September 2026 survey, 44.7% of shoppers said they check a brand's site after an AI recommendation (more on that).
We've seen this from the receiving end. In September 2026, a prospect filled in our quote form and said they found our studio by asking ChatGPT "best website agency in toronto".
We don't know which sources ChatGPT read to give that answer. Only OpenAI can see that. What we can do is lay out what's documented, what the research says, and what a local business can act on.
Key facts
| Question | Short answer | Source | |---|---|---| | How does it search? | Rewrites your question into search queries for its search partners | OpenAI help page | | How does it know your city? | Approximate location from your IP address | OpenAI help page | | Do people click through? | 87.78% of ChatGPT users visit no outside site; Bing's chatbot cut some publishers' clicks by up to 94% | PPC Land, 2026-09-21 | | What helps you get named? | Review count predicted AI mentions better than star rating | Search Engine Journal, 2026-09-10 |
How does ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?
ChatGPT picks businesses from what its web search returns, then keeps the ones several sources describe the same way, instead of pulling names from some private ranked list of every company in Toronto.
According to OpenAI's help page, when a question needs current information, ChatGPT rewrites your prompt into search queries and "sometimes partners with other search providers" to run them.
The page's own example is a user in San Francisco asking for good restaurants nearby, which ChatGPT may turn into the search "top restaurants San Francisco". It doesn't stop there. After the first results, it may send "additional, more specific queries".
- You compete on the rewritten query. If you type "who should build my website" in your city, it likely runs as something like "best web design agency Toronto".
- It reads more than one page. A business described the same way on its site, its Google listing and a directory is easier to name.
The same page warns that "search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect", which makes sense once you see that ChatGPT is summarising what the web says about you.
If the web says little, so does the summary.
Where does ChatGPT get its list?
The list comes from search partners, the websites OpenAI can crawl, and, for some categories, listings partners. OpenAI documents all three.
| Source | What OpenAI says | What it means for you | |---|---|---| | Third-party search providers | ChatGPT "partners with other search providers" and sends them rewritten queries | Your rankings in ordinary search still feed the answer | | OpenAI's search crawler (named OAI-SearchBot) | "Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" (OpenAI crawler docs) | Block it in robots.txt and your own site drops out | | Local and reservation partners | May share location "with trusted third-party providers" for "nearby business listings"; shows reservations from OpenTable, Resy or Yelp (OpenAI help) | Listings on those platforms can surface directly, and Yelp reservations work in Canada |
OpenAI doesn't say which search provider answers which query. Or name every listings partner. For an agency or a trade, though, the pages that rank for "best X in Toronto" are often directories and lists. Ours is no exception.
A search for "best web design agencies Toronto" showed two agency directories and several agencies' own list articles on page one, which is why we wrote our agency comparison guide as a real comparison.
Do reviews matter more than stars?
They do. In a study by the local listings company Uberall, the number of reviews predicted AI mentions better than the star rating. Review volume predicted mentions in all five business types tested, and star ratings were the weaker signal in four of them. Hotels were the exception, where Google ratings mattered more.
Uberall wrote up the study for Search Engine Journal on September 10, 2026. Its team counted over 120,000 times an AI assistant named a business, across a sample of 3,793 locations in American cities and five assistants, ChatGPT among them.
- A high review count beats a high rating. Lower-rated grocery brands with many reviews were named 94.3% of the time; top-rated, few-review ones got 60.6%.
- A filled-in Google listing description was linked to a three-fold rise in grocery mention rates.
- In restaurants, photos mattered most, as "the single strongest predictor of restaurant mention frequency".
- It pays to be written about. Michelin mentions showed up in 94.5% of Perplexity's restaurant answers.
- ChatGPT names fewer places. Gemini "surfaces 8× more unique restaurants than ChatGPT", likely because it reads live Google Maps data.
That last one is the hard finding. A shorter list means a wider gap between named and not named.
The study covered dentists, restaurants, grocery stores, hotels and banks, but not Toronto and not professional services like ours, so treat it as direction, not a formula.
Why does it matter if nobody clicks?
In a chat answer, your name is often all a buyer takes away. The court filings put numbers on that.
Microsoft compared clicks from Bing with clicks from Copilot for the same news sites, and on pages from The New York Times clicks fell by up to 93%, while one other publisher group's pages saw a 94% drop.
A brief filed on September 17, 2026 puts ChatGPT's figure at 87.78% of users visiting no outside website when searching.
Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, wrote that the products are "largely substitutive, period, and will get more and more substitutive", according to the same PPC Land report. The answer replaces the visit.
These are publisher lawsuits. They measure news clicks, not calls to a plumber. The direction holds for a local business anyway. The buyer reads the short list, remembers two or three names, and contacts one. Our earlier piece on why a citation is the new position one covers this shift, and when buyers do click, the visitors it sends convert better than search traffic.
When the buyer does visit, the site has one job left. We cover it in what happens after the AI shortlist.
How can a Toronto business get named?
Start with what the rewritten search will find. That means your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your own site and the directories in your category. None of this is new work, but it matters more now, because a buyer who used to scan a page of links and find you on the third result now reads one short answer and stops there.
| Signal | What to do | Where | |---|---|---| | Review volume | Ask every finished client for a review, on a schedule, not once a year | Google Business Profile, plus the main directory in your trade | | Complete listing | Fill in the description, categories, hours, service area and photos | Google Business Profile, Bing Places | | Listing accuracy | Check edit notifications; Google now gives 4 days to reject a user's suggested edit (Search Engine Roundtable, 2026-09-23) | Google Business Profile email and dashboard | | Crawl access | Allow OpenAI's search crawler in your robots.txt file | Your website | | Plain service pages | One page per service that says what you do, where, and for whom, in words a buyer would type | Your website | | Third-party lists | Get listed, with reviews, on the directories that rank for "best X in Toronto" | Clutch, DesignRush, Yelp, or your trade's equivalent | | Editorial mentions | Earn coverage in local press, awards or trade publications | BlogTO, industry associations, award lists |
The 4-day rule has a second half. If you don't respond, Google "may automatically publish the update" when other public information supports the edit, "such as your business website".
Your own site is now evidence for your listing.
For the website itself, our guides on how to get cited by AI assistants and structured data for AI search go step by step. This work has a name, answer engine optimization, and to see where you stand on it, our free 24-page audit checks page speed, structured data and crawl access.
What we can't control
No business controls what ChatGPT says about it. Nobody can promise a placement either, since only OpenAI can see which sources an answer drew on and the same question can return different names each time.
- We can't see the sources. In our own lead's case, we don't know if the answer came from our site, a directory or something else.
- The answers change. The same question asked twice, from two places, can return different names.
- The partners aren't fully public. OpenAI names three reservation partners, but not every search or listings provider.
The research has limits too. Both the Uberall study and the click data are American.
The other assistants work differently. Gemini draws on Google Maps, and Google is also testing a feature that has Gemini phone businesses for you, open only to some American Pixel owners on a paid plan (TechCrunch, 2026-09-24).
What you can control is whether the web describes you clearly, consistently and often. That is the input ChatGPT reads.