How ChatGPT decides which Toronto businesses to recommend
What shapes the businesses ChatGPT names when someone asks for a local recommendation, and how to check where you stand.
Key takeaways
- When ChatGPT searches the web, its recommendations are built from the pages it reads, so what those pages say about you matters.
- Consistent business details across your website and listings make it easier for an assistant to recognize you as one business.
- The words in your reviews often echo the words people use when they ask for a recommendation.
- Answers vary from one run to the next, so check by asking the same question several times rather than once.
Two ways ChatGPT answers a question
It helps to know that ChatGPT can answer in two broad ways.
The first is from what it learned during training: a large snapshot of text, up to a certain date. Ask it about the CN Tower and it can answer from memory. For a small business in Scarborough or the Junction, that memory may be thin, out of date or missing.
The second is by searching the web in the moment. For questions about local businesses, current hours or recent openings, ChatGPT often runs a search, reads a handful of pages and writes its answer from them. When it does, it usually shows links to the sources it used.
For local recommendations, that second mode is the one that matters most to you, because it’s the one you can influence. You can’t edit what a model learned two years ago. You can change what’s on the pages it reads today.
What it reads
OpenAI doesn’t publish exactly how ChatGPT chooses its sources, and anyone who claims to know the full recipe is guessing. But because many answers show their sources, you can see patterns. For a question like “good Thai restaurant in Liberty Village,” the links often include a mix of:
- Businesses’ own websites, especially menu, service and about pages.
- Review and listing sites such as Yelp or TripAdvisor.
- Local publications and roundups, like BlogTO or Toronto Life.
- Community discussions, including Reddit threads on r/askTO or r/toronto.
- Directories and industry sites relevant to the category.
If someone read only those pages, would they know what you specialize in, which neighbourhood you’re in and who you’re a good fit for? Our article on the sources AI assistants tend to trust in Toronto goes deeper on this.
Why consistency helps
Say you run a dental clinic in the Annex. Your website calls it “Annex Family Dental.” Yelp lists “Annex Dental Clinic” with an old suite number. A directory has a phone number you stopped using in 2022.
A person can probably work out these are the same place. A system pulling snippets from several pages to write a quick answer has less to go on. When details conflict, it’s harder to connect your reviews, your listings and your website into one clear picture, and easier to mix you up or leave you out.
The fix is unglamorous. Make these match everywhere you appear:
- Business name, spelled the same way
- Street address, including suite or unit number
- Phone number and website address
- Hours, including holiday hours
- Business category and a short description of your main services
The language in your reviews
People ask assistants in natural language: “a dentist in the Annex who’s gentle with nervous patients.” Real customer reviews often contain that same kind of language: “She was so patient with my anxiety.” When an assistant reads reviews as part of its research, those phrases can line up with the question being asked.
You can see this in the answers themselves. Recommendations often include a short summary of what people say, such as “known for friendly staff” or “praised for quick emergency appointments.” Reviews are an obvious source for that kind of description.
You can’t, and shouldn’t, script your reviews. But you can:
- Ask happy customers for a review at a natural moment, like right after a good appointment or a finished job.
- Make it easy with a direct link.
- Reply to reviews, including critical ones, in a calm and specific way.
- Notice the themes that keep coming up, and make sure your own website says the same things clearly.
Avoid offering discounts or gifts in exchange for reviews. Most review platforms prohibit it, and it undermines the very trust you’re trying to build.
Why answers change from one run to the next
Ask ChatGPT the same question three times and you may get three different lists. That’s normal, and there are a few general reasons for it:
- Generated answers vary. Assistants write each answer fresh, with some built-in variation in wording and choices.
- Searches vary. Small differences in the search it runs, or in what comes back, change which pages it reads.
- Context matters. Your phrasing, earlier messages in the conversation, location and memory settings can all shape the answer.
- Things change. Pages get updated, new reviews appear and the models themselves are updated.
This means “Does ChatGPT recommend us?” rarely has a simple yes or no answer. The more useful question is “How often are we named, for which questions, and how are we described?”
How to check for yourself
You don’t need special tools. Here’s a simple method:
- Write down five to ten questions your customers actually ask. Mix broad ones (“best hair salon in Scarborough”) with specific ones (“salon in Scarborough that does curly cuts and is open Sundays”).
- Use a fresh chat for each question, or a temporary chat, so earlier messages don’t influence the answer.
- Ask each question several times, ideally spread over a few days.
- Record who is named, how each business is described and which sources are linked.
- Look for patterns. Are you named for some questions but not others? Does a competitor keep showing up thanks to one particular article? Is anything about you out of date or wrong?
Practical tip: Keep a simple spreadsheet with four columns: question, date, businesses named, sources linked. After a few weeks you’ll have a far clearer picture than any single screenshot can give you.
It’s worth repeating the exercise in Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google’s AI features. They work differently and often cite different sources. Our guide to Google AI Overviews and AI Mode covers the Google side.
What you can do about it
Once you know where you stand, the work is fairly concrete:
- Make your website say plainly what you do, who you do it for and which parts of Toronto you serve.
- Clean up inconsistent listings, starting with the ones that show up as sources.
- Add structured data so your key details are labelled clearly. See our guide to schema markup for local businesses.
- Keep your Google Business Profile complete with our Business Profile checklist.
- Earn genuine mentions through local press, neighbourhood guides and community involvement.
ChatGPT doesn’t follow a published rulebook, but you control the raw material. If you’re new to all this, our plain-English guide to AI search optimization is a good place to start.
If you’d rather have someone run these checks and turn them into a plan, our AI visibility audits and monthly monitoring do exactly that. If you’d like to hear what we’d look at first, book a free 20-minute call.
