What ChatGPT can see about your business, and what to do if you have no website

Two things happened in the same week of July 2026. OpenAI opened a self-serve advertising platform for ChatGPT, and it licensed Yelp’s reviews, ratings and photos for local answers. A third is announced but not shipped: letting a customer contact a business from inside the conversation.

If you run a business that people find locally, the practical question is not what the deals mean for OpenAI. It is what an assistant can currently say about you, and how much of that you control.

The answer is: more than you would guess, and most of it does not need a website.

The short answer

Four things decide what ChatGPT can say about your business. The place record, meaning your name, address, coordinates, category and hours in the datasets assistants draw on, which decides whether you exist as an entity at all. Licensed reviews, which OpenAI now buys from Yelp in the countries Yelp covers. Your own site, if OpenAI’s crawlers are allowed to read it. And the open web, meaning mentions, listicles and directories. You control the first three outright. The first one needs no website, is usually already there without your knowledge, and is the one almost nobody has checked.

Why this is suddenly worth an afternoon

For two years the honest answer to “how do I show up in ChatGPT” was that you mostly could not steer it. That is changing, and the direction is visible in what got built rather than in what got announced.

22 July 2026: OpenAI opened a self-serve Ads Manager. One of its campaign types does not send the click to your website at all. It opens a conversation with a business agent.

23 July 2026: OpenAI licensed Yelp’s reviews, ratings, photos and business information for local answers. Yelp had confirmed the agreement in its own results release back in February, in one line: “we recently signed an agreement with OpenAI.”

Announced, not shipped: Yelp’s Request a Quote inside ChatGPT, where a customer asks for a quote from a service provider without leaving the chat.

Read those three together and the shape is clear. The assistant is being built into a place where a customer finds a business, judges it, and contacts it, without a browser in the middle. That is a different thing from being cited in an answer, and it is worth preparing for separately.

One caveat before you act on any of it, because it is the thing the coverage skipped. Yelp is not everywhere. Its own developer documentation covers 32 countries and territories, and its 2025 annual report shows $1,455.3 million of revenue from the United States against $9.7 million from every other country combined. If you trade outside those 32, the Yelp half of this is inert and the place record carries everything. We set out which listing feeds what, country by country, in the piece on Foursquare business listings and ChatGPT.

The four things it can see

Ranked by how much control you have, which is not the order anyone writes them in.

1. The place record, which you control and probably have not looked at

This is the boring, structured fact of your business: legal name, street address, map coordinates, category, opening hours, phone, website if you have one. It sits in point-of-interest datasets that get licensed to consumer apps, and one of those datasets is Foursquare Places, whose own product page states that it “powers leading consumer apps like OpenAI, Apple Maps.”

Two things about it that catch people out.

It already exists. These records get generated from public data, so there is very likely one for your business that you have never seen, containing whatever was true a few years ago. Wrong hours, an old phone number, a pin in the car park behind the building, or a category that puts you in the wrong kind of answer entirely.

It needs no website. This is the part worth sitting with. A business with no website at all, and a correct claimed place record, can be named in an assistant’s answer. A business with a beautiful website and a wrong category often is not, because the assistant never got as far as the website.

If nothing else in this article gets done, do this one. It is free and it takes twenty minutes.

2. Licensed reviews, which you control where they exist

Reviews are the layer everyone writes about, and it is the second question, not the first. An assistant asks what people say about a business only after it has established that the business exists and is the right kind of thing.

Where Yelp operates, it is now a licensed source, which is different in kind from being scraped: it is bought, structured and branded. Where Yelp does not operate, the review layer in practice is Google and whatever your market actually uses.

The useful reframing here is not “get more reviews”. It is that reviews are being read by something that summarises rather than displays. A wall of five-star ratings with no text is close to useless to a summariser. Twenty reviews that say what the job was, how long it took and what it cost give it something to work with, and they are what ends up quoted.

3. Your own site, if you let it be read

Here is a mistake that is common, expensive and silent.

OpenAI publishes three separate crawlers, and its own documentation gives each a different job:

Agent	What OpenAI says it does
OAI-SearchBot	”used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features”
GPTBot	”used to crawl content that may be used in training our generative AI foundation models”
ChatGPT-User	visits a page when “users ask ChatGPT or a CustomGPT a question”

They are not one thing called “the AI bots”. Blocking GPTBot is a defensible decision about whether your content trains a model. Blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from being findable in ChatGPT, and blocking ChatGPT-User blocks a visit that a real person triggered by asking about you.

Plenty of sites blocked all three in one go during the 2023 and 2024 wave of “block the AI scrapers” advice, when only the first of them existed in most people’s minds. The cost does not show up anywhere. Google rankings do not move. Traffic does not obviously drop. You simply stop being available to a growing share of the questions your customers ask. Go and read your own robots.txt before you do anything else on this list.

What your site should carry, if you have one: the address, hours and service area as text rather than inside an image, one real page per service, prices or price ranges if you can bear to publish them, and LocalBusiness structured data. Nothing exotic.

4. The open web, which you influence rather than control

Mentions, local news, industry directories, association pages, “best X in Y” listicles. You cannot edit these, and the leverage is smaller than the effort usually spent on it. The test worth applying to any directory before you invest an hour in it: is the page public, does it load without a login, and does it say something specific about you. A listing behind a form feeds nothing.

”I do not have a website. Am I invisible?”

No, and this is the single most useful thing in this article for a lot of businesses.

A tiler, a dental practice, a garage, a physiotherapist, a small hotel. Many of them never built a site, or built one in 2016 and let it lapse, and have run for years on word of mouth plus a map pin. The assumption is that this makes them invisible to anything new. It does not, because the layer that decides whether you appear in an assistant’s answer was never the website.

What you should do, in order:

1. Claim and correct the place record. Name, address, coordinates, category, hours, phone. This is the whole game for a business with no site.
2. Claim your Google Business Profile and finish it properly. In most markets it is the strongest single record you own, and it feeds Google’s own AI answers directly.
3. Get reviews with words in them. Ask customers to say what the job was. A summariser needs sentences, not stars.
4. Get onto the two or three directories your market actually uses, chosen by the public-page test above.
5. Then consider a small site, if and only if steps one to four are done. Five real pages that say what you do, where, for whom and roughly what it costs will do more than a large site built before any of this.

The order matters more than the list. A business that builds a website while its place record still has the wrong category has spent the money at the wrong end.

Findable is not the same as reachable

This is the part I would watch over the next year.

Every piece of advice in circulation, including most of this article, is about being findable: appearing in the answer. What OpenAI is building points at something further on. An ad campaign type that opens a business agent conversation instead of sending a click to a website. A quote request that happens inside the chat. In both cases the customer never arrives on your property at all.

That changes which properties matter. Response time starts to matter more than star average. Whether your listing has a working phone number matters more than whether your homepage is beautiful. Being contactable through a channel you do not own is an uncomfortable position, and it is arriving whether or not anyone is comfortable.

Nothing here needs acting on yet, because Request a Quote has not shipped and the ad platform is live in a handful of countries. It is worth knowing which way the ground is tilting while it is still cheap to move.

What not to do

Do not buy a Yelp-shaped service in a country Yelp does not cover. If someone pitches Yelp review management for a business in Latvia, Estonia, India or most of the world, that is the audit finished. They read a headline.

Do not block crawlers you have not identified. See above. It is the most expensive free mistake on this list.

Do not trust a percentage without a method. A figure claiming that 60 to 70 percent of ChatGPT’s local results come from one source is circulating widely right now. We traced it to a single article attributing it to two researchers, with no date, no sample size and no method. It may be roughly right. It is not evidence, and you should not let anyone sell you a service on it.

Do not buy a visibility score. A single blended number hides the only distinction that matters, which is whether you are a stable source for a question or a rotating one. We wrote out why in what an AI visibility score hides.

How to check what it says about you, in fifteen minutes

Do this before you change anything, because a baseline you did not take cannot be recovered later.

Write down five or six questions a real customer would ask to find a business like yours. Put your city in them. Do not name your company: the question is what gets recommended, not what the assistant knows when prompted.

Ask each one in ChatGPT, and in whatever else your customers use. Write down which businesses get named and which sources get cited. Then do it again on two more days, because the sources shift enough between days that one reading tells you very little.

Read the extremes rather than the average. A question where you are named every time and a question where you appear once in three are different problems needing opposite responses. If a competitor is named and you are not, open the page that got cited and look at what makes it quotable. It is usually a direct answer, a price, or a specific list. That single observation is a better guide to what to write next than any keyword tool.

What nobody knows yet, including us

Worth stating, because the confident version of this article would be wrong.

Neither OpenAI nor Yelp has published which countries the review integration is switched on in. Nobody publishes how long a listing change takes to reach an answer. And the relative weight of the four sources above is not documented by anyone who actually knows, which is why the numbers floating around have no methods attached.

What is knowable is the direction and the mechanics, and those are enough to act on. Fix the record, allow the right crawler, get reviews with sentences in them, and measure properly instead of guessing.

Quick answers

Can ChatGPT recommend a business with no website? Yes. The place record is what decides whether you exist in the answer, and it exists independently of any website.

What is the first thing to do? Find and correct your place record, then your Google Business Profile. Both are free.

Should I block AI crawlers? Only after checking which one. OAI-SearchBot is how you get found in ChatGPT. GPTBot is training. They are different decisions.

Is Yelp relevant to me? Only if you trade in one of the 32 countries and territories its own documentation covers. If not, the place record and your own site carry the weight.

Is this only about restaurants? No. Yelp’s larger revenue category in 2025 was Services at $947.6 million, which is home, auto, professional, pets, real estate and financial services, against $443.7 million for restaurants, retail and other.

Where to start

Three things, in this order, none of which costs anything.

1. Read your own robots.txt and find out whether you are blocking OAI-SearchBot.
2. Find your place record, look at what it says, and fix it.
3. Ask five customer questions in ChatGPT today and write down the answers, so you have a before.

If you would rather have the third one run properly, with a question set built for your market and samples taken on a schedule instead of when someone remembers, that is what AI search visibility is as a service. The method above is the whole of it and we would rather you ran it yourself than bought a dashboard.

If you are an agency whose clients have started asking about this, tell us the markets they are in and we will tell you what actually carries in each one, which is a different answer in Riga than it is in Manchester.