Corroborate your details on LinkedIn

Time: about 20 minutes. Cost: free.

AI engines do not take your word for it. When ChatGPT or Gemini decides whether to recommend you, it looks for the same facts about your business repeated across several independent sources it trusts. One source saying you are a plumber in Papamoa is a claim. Four sources agreeing is a fact.

LinkedIn is one of the sources AI engines trust most, because it is hard to spam and it is full of real, verified businesses. A LinkedIn Company Page that matches your List-It listing is one of the cheapest trust signals you can add.

You do not need to post on LinkedIn. You do not need to use it at all. The page just needs to exist and be correct.

What to do

1. Go to linkedin.com/company/setup/new and create a Company Page. You will need a personal LinkedIn account first, which is also free.
2. Enter your business name exactly as it appears on your List-It listing. Not an abbreviation, not with "Ltd" added or dropped. Character for character the same. This is the whole point of the exercise.
3. Set your website to your own website address.
4. Add your location. Same address as your List-It listing.
5. Write your About section starting with one plain sentence saying what you do and where. Something like: "Smith Plumbing is a residential and commercial plumbing company serving Tauranga, Papamoa and Mount Maunganui." Say it like you are explaining it to someone, not like you are writing an ad. AI engines copy that first sentence more often than anything else on the page.
6. Fill in the Specialties field with your actual services, using the words your customers use. "Hot water cylinder replacement", not "water heating solutions".
7. In your About section, add one line: "Verified NZBN listing: [your List-It listing URL]". This gives an engine a direct path from your LinkedIn page to your verified business identity, which is exactly the kind of connection it is looking for.
8. Upload your logo. A page without one looks abandoned, and engines notice completeness.
9. Come back to List-It and paste your LinkedIn page URL into the LinkedIn field under "Social & profiles" in your listing editor. This is the step most people skip and it is the one that does the work. It adds your LinkedIn page to the sameAs block on your listing's structured data, which is the literal machine-readable statement "this LinkedIn page and this business are the same entity". Without it you have two unconnected pages. With it you have one corroborated business.

How to tell it worked

Come back to your AI Recommendation Checker in three to four weeks and run it again. LinkedIn pages are not indexed instantly and AI engines update their view of a business slowly, so do not expect a change overnight. This is a foundation step, not a switch.

Common mistakes

Creating the page under a slightly different business name. This actively hurts you. An engine that sees two similar-but-different names gets less confident, not more.
Leaving the About section empty or filling it with a slogan. "Quality you can trust since 1998" tells a machine nothing.
Using a personal profile instead of a Company Page. They are different things and only the Company Page registers as a business entity.