People aren’t just Googling businesses anymore. They’re asking ChatGPT who they should hire.
And Kendra is seeing firsthand what happens when ChatGPT starts recommending you. In this episode, she shares the strategy she uncovered after several people told her they found her because ChatGPT recommended her as a business coach for health coaches.
The answer isn’t to pump out more random content or try to “trick” AI into mentioning you. It’s about becoming incredibly clear about your niche, consistently creating useful long-form content, and building enough authority online that AI can connect your name with the problem you solve. Kendra breaks down exactly what that can look like for coaches who want to start showing up in AI recommendations.
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Listen to the podcast here
Listen on your preferred podcast platform:
In This Episode:
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The number one thing ChatGPT says has to be true about you before it will ever put your name forward (I’ve been preaching this for years and now AI is backing me up)
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Why your reels alone will never get you cited in an AI answer, no matter how good they are
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The kind of content people are actually typing into ChatGPT, and why it looks nothing like what you’ve been writing for Google
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A setting on your website that could be quietly blocking you from ever showing up in AI results
RESOURCES:
- Bing Webmaster Tools – free, and the AI Performance report shows which of your pages get cited in AI answers and what people were searching when it happened
- OpenAI’s crawler guide for publishers – how to make sure ChatGPT can actually see your site
Leave the podcast a 5-star review: https://ratethispodcast.com/wealthy
How to Get Recommended by ChatGPT (I Asked It Directly and Here’s What It Said)
A year and a half ago, someone booked a sales call with me who I had zero prior interaction with. No DM history. Not on my email list. Hadn’t been lurking my content for eight months like most people do before they finally reach out.
So I asked her what I always ask: how did you find out about me?
Her answer stopped me for a second.
“ChatGPT recommended you as the best business coach for health coaches.”
Huh. Interesting.
After that call I went straight into ChatGPT and started poking around, trying to figure out what had actually happened. Why me? What made it spit out my name? And most importantly, how do I make that happen again?
The answers I got back were vague. Nothing I could actually act on. So I filed it away and forgot about it.
Except it kept happening.
Every time someone follows me on Instagram, I ask them how they found my profile. And over the past year, I’ve had a steady stream of people tell me the same thing: ChatGPT recommended you.
So I finally sat down and did the deep dive. I went back into ChatGPT and asked it directly, in plain language, how a coach gets recommended by it. And this time I got an answer that was actually clear enough to build a strategy around.
That’s what this post is. Everything ChatGPT told me about how to get recommended by ChatGPT, plus my take on what actually matters and what you can ignore.
Fair warning: some of this is going to sound like advice I’ve been screaming into the void for years. That’s because it is. Turns out the machine agrees with me.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
Let’s zoom out for a second, because I want you to understand what’s actually shifting here.
Search is changing. Not slowly. Fast.
The way we used to find answers online was: type a question into Google, get a list of the top ten websites, click a few, piece together an answer. That was the whole game. And that’s what SEO was built around, ranking on that list.
That’s not how people are behaving anymore.
Now you type a question into Google and you get an AI summary at the top that answers it for you. A lot of people never scroll past it. And an increasing number of people skip Google entirely and go straight into ChatGPT to ask their question in normal human language.
Which means the referral engine has changed. It’s not just “who ranks number one.” It’s “who does the AI trust enough to name.”
And when AI names you, something interesting happens on the other end. The people who told me ChatGPT recommended me said things like, “as soon as you came up in ChatGPT, I knew you were legit.” Then they went and looked at my content, and by the time they landed in my DMs they were already sold.
That’s a warm lead you didn’t have to chase, didn’t have to pay for, and didn’t have to nurture for six months. That’s the opportunity here.
Step 1: Stay Consistent With Your Niche
I’m putting this first because ChatGPT put it first, and because I’ve been saying it for years and getting eye rolls for it.
The number one thing that determines whether AI recommends you is niche consistency.
Why AI Needs to Be Able to Categorize You
Here’s the mechanic. ChatGPT is scraping the internet to build an understanding of who’s who. For it to recommend you, it needs to be able to categorize you. It needs a strong, unmistakable association between three things:
- Your name
- Your specific audience
- The specific problem you solve
If hundreds of pieces of content across the internet reinforce that same expertise, it becomes very easy for AI to understand what you’re an authority on. The signal is loud. There’s no ambiguity.
But if you’re out there talking about gut health one week and hormones the next and mindset the week after, speaking to postpartum moms and then perimenopausal women and then twenty-something athletes, the AI can’t make an association. There’s nothing to categorize. You’re noise.
And if it can’t categorize you, it will never recommend you. It’ll recommend someone else who made it easy.
This Is the Niche Argument I Wish I’d Had Five Years Ago
I’ve been telling coaches to niche down forever, and the pushback is always the same. I don’t want to limit myself. I help lots of people. I’m afraid of turning people away.
Fine. I’ve heard it all. But here’s a new reason that has nothing to do with your messaging or your marketing psychology and everything to do with cold hard infrastructure:
If you don’t niche, you’re invisible to the systems that are increasingly deciding who gets found.
That’s it. That’s the argument. As search shifts toward AI, being a generalist doesn’t just make your marketing harder. It makes you structurally unrecommendable.
So pick one type of problem, for one type of person, and go all in.
Step 2: Create Long Form Searchable Content
This is number two on ChatGPT’s list and it’s something I’ve talked about on this podcast many times.
You need long form searchable content. Blogs. Show notes. Podcasts that actually live on your website. YouTube.
Your Podcast Alone Is Not Enough
I want to be really clear about this because I see coaches make this mistake constantly.
If your podcast only exists as an audio file on Apple and Spotify, AI is not going to find it. Audio floating in a podcast app is not searchable content. You have to take that podcast and put it on your website, with show notes underneath it, or ideally a full blog post attached to it.
That’s what I do. I take my transcript and turn it into a blog post, and I put that under the podcast player on my site. Now that episode exists as both an audio asset and a searchable authority asset. Two jobs, one recording.
YouTube counts too, and it counts for a specific reason: YouTube is connected to Google. That’s a direct line into the search ecosystem.
Writing articles for other websites, doing collaborations, doing blog swaps, guesting on other podcasts. All of it counts. Because what AI is doing is scraping the internet looking for answers, and if your name is constantly showing up attached to the problem someone is trying to solve, you’re the one who gets named.
Why Short Form Alone Won’t Get You There
Social media, for the most part, is short form. Reels, TikToks, carousels. Quick dopamine hits.
And listen, that’s great for attention. Short form is unmatched for getting eyeballs on you. But attention and trust are two different currencies, and short form doesn’t always buy you the second one.
Now, this isn’t universally true. Some people do incredibly well from talking head Reels on Instagram. But when you look closely at what those people are actually doing, they’re usually creating series. They’re covering one topic in depth across multiple Reels over time. They’ve found a way to do long form in short form packaging.
For most coaches, though, there’s enormous value in having an actual long form home. A blog. A podcast. A YouTube channel. Something with depth where people can go deeper with you when they’re ready.
Pick the format that matches how you like to show up. Audio, written, or video. It genuinely does not matter which one. What matters is that you have one.
Start With One Piece a Month
I know this feels overwhelming. I know you’re already stretched.
So start smaller than you think you need to. One podcast episode a month. One blog post a month. One YouTube video a month.
The thing about long form content is that it compounds. It doesn’t disappear from a feed in 48 hours. It sits there, gets indexed, gets scraped, and keeps working for you.
I’ll show you what compounding actually looks like. I’ve been in this niche since 2019. I’m recording episode 347 of this podcast right now, and I have not missed a single week. Every single one of those episodes has a blog post attached to it. I also have a YouTube channel, though these days I only post podcast episodes there, because after having my little guy I just couldn’t keep up with the recording demands of proper YouTube content. Maybe in the future. On top of that, I’ve done a huge number of collaborations over the years.
At this point I have thousands of pieces of content all pointing at the same expertise.
That is the single biggest reason I think I get recommended by ChatGPT. Not because I cracked some code. Because I showed up consistently in one lane for six years and the internet noticed.
You don’t need six years of backlog to start. You need to start.
Step 3: Write for What People Ask ChatGPT, Not What They Google
This one is a genuine shift in how you should approach content ideas, and it’s coming straight from the horse’s mouth.
When people used Google, they typed keywords. Short, clipped, robotic. “Weight loss plan women.” “Cortisol supplements.”
When people use ChatGPT, they type like humans talking to a person. Full sentences. Natural language. Conversational.
- How do I lose weight when I’m perimenopausal and exhausted all the time?
- Can you create a weight loss plan for me?
- Why do I keep waking up at 3am?
- What should I eat if I have high cortisol?
So when you’re brainstorming content, stop thinking about keywords and start thinking about questions. Real ones. The exact way your person would phrase it if they were typing it into ChatGPT at 11pm.
Those questions are your content topics. Answer them thoroughly, in long form, on your website.
Step 4: Make Your Content Easy for AI to Extract Answers From
There’s an SEO piece to this, and ChatGPT was pretty specific about it.
It said to make your content easy for AI to extract answers from by using:
- Clear titles
- Descriptive headlines
- Direct answers
- FAQs
- Examples
- Steps
- Takeaways
And then it said something I want to frame and hang on my wall: don’t bury the answer under 800 words of fluff.
If someone asks a question and your article makes them wade through your whole personal origin story before you actually answer it, AI is going to struggle to extract a clean answer from your page. And so is a human, for the record.
Answer the question. Then elaborate. Structure your content so the value is findable, not hidden.
Step 5: Turn Your Podcast Into a Written Asset
ChatGPT specifically called this out, which I found validating because it’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
Do not publish an episode with two sentences in the show notes. That’s a wasted asset. Instead, create a substantial companion article that summarizes what you teach, with headings organized around the questions you’re answering.
One podcast episode becomes two things: an audio asset and a searchable authority asset.
And if the thought of writing a full blog post for every episode makes you want to lie down, I have good news. I have a Claude project set up specifically for this. It takes my podcast transcript and turns it into an SEO friendly blog post. The whole thing takes minutes.
There is no reason in 2026 to leave your podcast episodes stranded as audio only. The tools to convert them are sitting right there.
Step 6: Build Depth, Not Random Volume
This is the one I think most coaches will get wrong, because the instinct when you hear “create more content” is to just start pumping out everything.
ChatGPT was clear: 20 excellent pieces of content that reinforce your expertise are more strategically useful than a firehose of generic AI written SEO posts on loosely related topics.
Build clusters of content around a handful of things you want to become known for.
Think About This as Content Pillars
You’ve probably heard the term content pillars before. This is where it becomes genuinely strategic rather than just an organizational tool.
Your pillars are the small number of topics you want the internet to permanently associate with your name.
Mine are:
- Choosing a niche
- Messaging
- Offer creation
- Ads and lead generation
- Webinars
That’s it. Five things. And I’ve made hundreds of pieces of content across those five things over six years. When ChatGPT scrapes the internet and encounters my name over and over attached to those specific topics, the association becomes undeniable.
So sit down and figure out your pillars. Three to five topics, maximum. Then build clusters of depth around each one instead of spraying content across twelve loosely related subjects.
Depth beats volume. Every time.
The Technical Stuff: Let the Crawlers In
Okay, I’m going to be honest with you. This next one came from ChatGPT and I don’t fully understand it. It’s more technical than my usual wheelhouse. But I’m passing it along because you might get it, or you might have a web person who does.
Don’t Accidentally Block the AI Crawlers
ChatGPT said to make sure AI crawlers can actually access your website. In particular, don’t accidentally block OpenAI’s search bot. OpenAI specifically says that allowing it helps your content appear in ChatGPT search.
So there’s apparently a setting on your website that can block this, and if it’s blocked, none of the rest of this matters, because the crawler can’t see your beautiful long form content in the first place.
I’m going to go look this up and make sure mine is allowed, because I would like to keep getting recommended, thank you very much.
If you don’t know how to check this, ask ChatGPT. I’m not being flippant. That’s genuinely the move. Ask it how to check whether your site is blocking AI-SearchBot and it’ll walk you through it.
Use Bing Webmaster Tools
This one I found really interesting.
Bing now has AI visibility reporting that can show you when your pages are being used or cited in AI generated answers, and the kinds of queries associated with them.
Think about how useful that is. Instead of guessing what content to make next, you can see which of your pages are actually feeding AI answers and what people were asking when it happened. That’s direct feedback on what’s working.
Go set up Bing Webmaster Tools. And again, if you don’t know how, ask ChatGPT.
Keep Your Cornerstone Content Current
This one I love.
ChatGPT said to refresh older cornerstone articles when the information changes, because recency matters, particularly for questions where the answer evolves.
So your best performing, most important pieces of content are not a set-it-and-forget-it situation. If you wrote a killer article three years ago and half the information in it is now outdated, go update it. Refresh the stats. Add new sections. Update the examples.
This is also just an enormous efficiency unlock. Updating an existing high performing article is significantly less work than creating a brand new one from scratch, and it often gets you a better return.
Think Authority Footprint, Not One Blog Post
The last thing ChatGPT said pulls the entire strategy together, and it’s the piece I want you to actually sit with.
The goal is not to rank one blog post.
The goal is to have enough consistent information about you across your website, your podcast, your interviews, and other reputable places online that an AI system can confidently conclude: this person is a recognized expert on X, for Y type of person.
That’s the whole thing. Consistency, across many places, over time, pointing at one clear expertise.
The Real Question You Should Be Asking
Here’s the takeaway ChatGPT gave me, and honestly it reframed the entire thing for me.
Stop asking, “how do I get ChatGPT to recommend me?”
Start asking, “have I created enough high quality evidence online for ChatGPT to confidently understand what I should be recommended for?”
That’s a completely different question. The first one is looking for a hack. The second one is a strategy, and it’s one you have full control over.
You’re not gaming an algorithm. You’re building a body of evidence.
What This Actually Looks Like If You Start Today
Let me boil this all the way down, because I don’t want you closing this post feeling overwhelmed.
There are two things that matter most:
One: niche down and go all in. One type of problem, one type of person. Stop hedging. Stop keeping the door open for everyone. The clarity is what makes you categorizable, and being categorizable is what makes you recommendable.
Two: create long form content for that person, consistently. One podcast episode a month. One blog post a month. One YouTube video a month. Whatever format you’ll actually stick with.
That’s the whole strategy. Everything else in this post is optimization on top of those two foundations.
And the reason consistency matters so much is that this is a compounding game. One blog post does nothing. Twelve blog posts start to build a pattern. Fifty blog posts across three years, all pointing at the same expertise, and suddenly you’re the person AI names when someone types in a question at midnight.
There’s no shortcut here. But there’s also no gatekeeper, no ad spend, and no algorithm to please. Just show up in one lane, in long form, over and over, and let the internet build the case for you.
That’s how you get recommended by ChatGPT.
Listen to the Full Episode
I go deeper on all of this in the episode, including exactly what ChatGPT said word for word and how I’m changing my own content strategy because of it. If you’re serious about being findable in an AI-first search world, this one’s worth 15 minutes of your time.
