How do you get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude?

Simmonds describes it as a query fan-out. The model takes your question and rewrites it into many versions, asking for the best, the top, the highest rated, the most reviewed, then searches all of them at once across Reddit, YouTube, Quora, Yelp and regular search. It counts how often each business name comes back and weights the ones mentioned most. The answer you read is a tally of what the internet already says about you.

Simmonds does not say SEO is dead, he says the old version of it is not enough. Writing a few blog posts, optimizing your landing pages, getting a few links and asking Google to index you is the thing of the past. Your site still matters and still has to be crawlable. It is just one of many places the model looks.

Get your own site in order first, using the exact language a customer would put in a prompt, including your town name. Put your Yelp and TripAdvisor recognition where it can be seen. Get rated well on the review sites, consider partnering with a creator who will make video about you, and answer the Reddit threads where people ask for the best in your area. Simmonds walks through this using a coffee shop as the example.

Google owns YouTube and has told ChatGPT and Perplexity they cannot scrape it, so Google is sitting on video data its competitors do not have. Simmonds argues Google is also commercially motivated to send people to YouTube rather than a video somewhere else, because of subscriptions and ad revenue. That makes video one of the most underrated opportunities right now. It is also the format that carries the most human connection when everything written can be generated.

Read the rules of a subreddit and understand its culture before you post anything. Add value to the conversation instead of dropping links. Simmonds got banned early on by taking every blog post he had written and submitting them all at once to subreddits like technology, entrepreneur and SEO. He has not been banned in about six years.

Simmonds says do both, in a specific way. Claim the subreddit at reddit.com/r/yourbrand, and create a user account that is clearly a named person tied to the brand, like Ross from distribution.ai. That named human is the one who goes into other communities and educates, engages, entertains and empowers. He also suggests having multiple people at the organization with their own accounts.

Educate, engage, entertain, empower. Educate means telling people what they do not know. Engage means asking the questions your audience is already sitting with. Entertain can be as simple as a meme about a shared struggle, and empower means celebrating the wins of the people you serve. Simmonds uses the four Es as the human half of the strategy, with site structure as the other half.

Simmonds gives two answers. Record what you already do, set the phone up while you work and publish one a day, because that costs you almost nothing. For the written side, use a tool like Claude connected to your CMS to draft a batch of posts on a topic, then edit them with your own hands before they go out.

One of them, done properly. Simmonds says it is far better to be the best in the world on a single channel than mediocre across Reddit, blogging, Facebook, YouTube and Quora at once. Which one depends on your niche: TikTok and Instagram for beauty, Instagram for interior design, TikTok for music, YouTube for entrepreneurship, X for tech, LinkedIn for management and HR, and Facebook groups for local business.

Simmonds thinks yes, but not the way people used to use it. Social sharing there has fallen off and it has become more of a media channel, with an audience skewing to 45 and 50 plus who consume passively. The value sits in Marketplace and in groups, where like-minded local people are actually talking. He calls the page a bait and switch and says the money is now in the groups.

Simmonds raises a few possibilities. Cost per click is rising as people scroll past ads faster, and many advertisers bid on queries with no commercial intent, since someone typing coffee is not the same buyer as someone typing coffee near me, and best is a different person than cheapest. If your product does not match the intent you are bidding on, you lose every time. He also says five creative variations is no longer enough and brands should be running fifty or more.

Accept some nuance, because Simmonds says perfect attribution no longer exists. Watch referral traffic from OpenAI, Perplexity and Claude, and if you want to go further, look at how often and how positively you get named in model answers using tools like Profound, AirOps or Athena. The measure that still holds up is self-attributed: ask how did you hear about us on your form, at checkout, or in person. If people keep saying ChatGPT while your analytics show nothing, that gap is the answer.