How to list your business in ChatGPT — and why there is no form
You have probably already looked. Google has a form, Bing has a form, Apple Maps has a form. ChatGPT surely has one too, and you just have not found it yet.
It does not. But the answer to the question you are really asking — where can I put my business so ChatGPT finds it — is not “nowhere”. Since July 2026 there is one place that matters more than any other, and it is a listing you may already have.
Why ChatGPT has no form
Google Business Profile, Bing Places and Apple Business Connect are registries. Their job is collecting facts from business owners, which is why they have verification steps, review queues and a support line.
ChatGPT does not keep a registry. When it answers a local question it either searches and reads what it finds, or answers from what it learned in training. Nowhere in that process is a record with your name on it that a form could update. That is also why it is so hard to get a wrong description corrected: there is no stored field holding the mistake. It works the description out again every time from its sources.
Two things look like exceptions and are not. OpenAI does run a merchant application at chatgpt.com/merchants, but it is for product catalogues in ChatGPT shopping, not for plumbers or dental practices. And ChatGPT has sold self-serve ads since May 2026. Those appear under the answer, marked as sponsored, and OpenAI’s stated policy is that ads do not influence what the answer says. An ad buys you a slot next to the recommendation. It does not make you the recommendation.
OpenAI, “Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT” (answer independence); OpenAI Help Center, “Ads in ChatGPT”. Self-serve ads opened on May 6, 2026.
Start with Yelp
On July 23, 2026, Yelp announced it was licensing its reviews, ratings, photos and business details to OpenAI for use in ChatGPT’s local answers. The deal is non-exclusive and the terms were not disclosed. A few weeks later, Steady Demand ran 2,880 local prompts through ChatGPT, covering 12 kinds of business in 12 US metros, and looked at where the business cards got their data. Yelp was behind 95.83% of them, from 93.75% for hair salons to 97.92% for plumbers.
Axios and Search Engine Land, July 23, 2026, on the Yelp licensing deal. Steady Demand, “ChatGPT’s Local Results Aren’t Coming From Foursquare”, August 21, 2026, data collected over 72 hours in August 2026. This is one study from shortly after the deal, and the arrangement is recent enough to change. Check it again before you plan a year around it.
In practice, your Yelp page is now the closest thing ChatGPT has to a listing for you. Claiming it is free at biz.yelp.com. Once it is yours, check the things a card would show: your categories, hours, service area, phone number and photos. A wrong category on Yelp used to cost you a few Yelp searches. Now it can shape how ChatGPT describes you.
One warning before you set up a review drive. Yelp’s rules say not to ask customers for reviews at all, and its recommendation software filters reviews that look solicited. The advice to “get more reviews” that works on Google can backfire on Yelp.
Yelp for Business Support Center, “Don’t Ask for Reviews”.
Then Bing Places
Bing Places for Business is free, takes about half an hour, and can import from your Google Business Profile, so most of the work is checking rather than typing. It moved to bing.com/forbusiness in October 2025, and the old bingplaces.com address sends you there. Expect a verification step before the listing goes live.
Bing is one of the sources OpenAI says ChatGPT search uses, but how much it relies on Bing is disputed. Seer Interactive found in early 2025 that 87% of ChatGPT’s citations matched Bing’s top results. That study used 100 questions and called its findings directional. A larger replication in April 2026, which also tracked the sub-searches ChatGPT runs behind the scenes, put the match at 27%. For local answers specifically, testing earlier this year found ChatGPT citing Google far more than Bing, which we cover in how to check what AI says. Treat Bing Places as cheap insurance, not as the main event.
Seer Interactive, “87% of SearchGPT Citations Match Bing’s Top Results”, February 2025. AI+ Automation, “Does ChatGPT Really Get 87% of Citations From Bing?”, April 2026, 400 questions.
That covers every form worth filling out. The rest of this page is about what ChatGPT reads when it goes beyond the card.
What else ChatGPT reads
The most detailed breakdown of what ChatGPT cites for local searches is BrightLocal’s. It ran 800 searches: one transactional and one informational query for each of 20 business types in 20 US cities. For each search it recorded the first ten sources ChatGPT showed.
| Source type | Share | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Business websites | 58% | Your own site. Entirely within your control. |
| Mentions | 27% | Editorial coverage. Wikipedia alone was 39% of these. |
| Directories | 15% | Mostly curated lists. See below. |
BrightLocal, “Uncovering ChatGPT Search Sources”. Data collected November 2024, which is before the Yelp deal. Yelp did not appear as a source at all then, and that has certainly changed. The other shares are the best published picture we have, but they are two years old.
Even allowing for its age, the business-website figure stands out. More than half of what ChatGPT cited was ordinary websites belonging to the businesses themselves, and you can edit yours this afternoon.
The curated lists
Among the directories BrightLocal saw, Three Best Rated led with 24%, then Expertise with 18% and Tripadvisor with 8%. The first two work differently from Yelp. They pick businesses rather than letting any business create a page.
Three Best Rated lists three businesses per category per city. It checks each one against what it calls a 50-point inspection covering reviews, reputation, complaint history and how current your website is, and it keeps re-checking after that. Its FAQ says it never takes payment for a listing and makes its money from ads on the site. You can suggest your business for free, but you still have to pass the inspection.
Expertise builds its lists from public databases such as licensing boards and state bar records. It has a form for requesting a review. Unlike Three Best Rated, it says providers who pass its review “may choose to advertise on the page to increase their visibility”, so placement there is not purely earned.
Three Best Rated, “50-Point Inspection” and FAQs. Expertise.com, “Our Selection Process” and “Get Reviewed”.
For both, the thing that gets you in is the thing a paying competitor cannot fake quickly: steady reviews, a rating that holds up, a site that is clearly looked after, and no trail of unresolved complaints.
What our own data adds
We have not measured ChatGPT ourselves at this scale. We did scan 399 local business websites, and for 43 Charlotte dental practices we also collected Perplexity’s answers and every source it cited. Two results are relevant here.
- The practices whose own websites Perplexity cited had a median of 491 reviews. The ones it never cited had 338. That was the only clearly significant difference we found.
- Structured data markup made no measurable difference. Schema is the fix sold most often in this category, and in our data it did not separate the cited practices from the rest.
Perplexity also leaned more on third-party pages than BrightLocal’s ChatGPT numbers suggest: 54% of its citations went to directories, roundup lists and similar pages. The two samples differ in engine, trade and year, so read that as a hint that engines weigh sources differently, not as a measurement of how. The method and caveats are in the write-up of that scan.
The checklist
- Claim and correct your Yelp page. It is where ChatGPT’s local business cards get their data. Categories, hours, phone and photos first.
- Claim Bing Places. Free, about half an hour, imports from Google.
- Put the answers on your own site in plain words. If customers ask “do you take emergency calls on weekends?”, that question and its answer should appear as text on a page. A grid of service icons does not answer it.
- Keep your details the same everywhere. Name, address, phone and hours should match on your site, Google, Yelp and Bing. When sources disagree, an assistant has to pick one, and it may pick the wrong one.
- Keep earning reviews, platform by platform. Review count was the one signal that predicted citation in our scan, and it is most of what the curated lists screen for. Ask on Google. On Yelp, follow Yelp’s rule and do not ask.
- Make sure AI crawlers can reach your site. In our scan, 15% of the sites we could test were blocking a crawler that AI assistants use to answer questions, either in robots.txt or at the server. You usually cannot tell by looking at your own site.
So there is still no ChatGPT form, and there probably never will be one in the Google sense. There is a Yelp page that now does much of that job, a Bing listing that costs half an hour, and a website that ChatGPT reads more than anything else. Get those three right and keep them right. It takes longer than filling out a form, and it is also much harder for a competitor to copy.