Why doesn’t my business show up in ChatGPT?

You are probably not missing. You are probably unconfirmed.

Shortly after Kelli and I got married, we lived in a small apartment and did what aspiring grown-ups did — we got a landline. It hardly ever rang. When it did, it was a solicitor.

One evening it rang and Kelli answered. The caller asked for T.J. Miller. She handed me the phone.

“You’re T.J. Miller?”

Yes. Who’s calling?

“Thee T.J. Miller?”

I mean — yes. I’m T.J. Miller.

He sounded thrilled. He said he was calling from TMZ and asked if he could ask me a few questions. Sure. Go ahead.

It took about a minute for both of us to work out that he wanted the actor and comedian. He got me.

Here is the part worth sitting with. I was a perfect match. Right name, real person, listed number, and I answered. What I did not have was anything that confirmed I was the one he was looking for. He had found something relevant. He had not found anyone who could vouch for it.

That is what is usually happening when a business doesn’t come back in an AI recommendation.

Owners tend to assume the problem is absence — that they aren’t in there at all. Almost always, they are. Some version of the business is in there. What isn’t there is confirmation. There are three companies within twenty miles with similar names. An old address on a directory nobody updated. A website that describes the work one way and a profile that describes it another. Nothing contradicts outright. Nothing agrees, either.

A human being will spend a minute sorting that out. He’ll ask a second question, the way TMZ did on the phone with me. A machine won’t. It has no minute to spend and no appetite for being wrong in public, so it returns the business it is sure about instead of the one it isn’t.

Which means the fix is rarely more words about yourself. It’s agreement.

Say plainly what you do and where you do it — in the same words, in every place someone might look. Make sure your site, your listings, and the pages other people have written about you are telling the same story. Ask the customers who already love you to say so somewhere public. Every one of those is another voice on the line answering yes, that’s him, that’s the one.

None of this is a trick, and none of it is new. It’s the same thing that has always made a referral work. When someone asks a friend who to call, the friend doesn’t just produce a name. He produces a name and a reason to believe it.

We spend a great deal of energy trying to be found. Less on being confirmed once we are.

If someone went looking to make sure you were the right one — what would they find?