How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

Where does ChatGPT find businesses to recommend?

When ChatGPT searches the web, it reads pages through OpenAI’s own crawler, called OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says any public website can appear in ChatGPT search. It also says a site that blocks OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. [1][2]

OpenAI’s FAQ adds that it can also get page addresses from a third-party search provider. It does not say which one. So cover the big indexes. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are both free. [1]

Without search, ChatGPT answers from what its model learned in training. That only changes when OpenAI ships a new model, so it is not something you can fix this month. Search is.

Can ChatGPT reach your site?

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser. Look for a block that names OAI-SearchBot, or a rule for all bots, followed by “Disallow: /”. If you find one, ChatGPT search cannot use your pages. A robots.txt that lets OpenAI’s search crawler in looks like this.

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Check your host or CDN too. Since July 2025, Cloudflare asks every new site on sign-up whether to allow AI crawlers. If someone clicked no, the block lives in Cloudflare, not in your robots file. [3]

After a change, give it a day. OpenAI says its systems take about 24 hours to pick up a robots.txt update. [2]

What should your pages say?

ChatGPT quotes sentences, so give it good ones. Put one plain line near the top of your home page that says what you do, for whom and where. “Family dental clinic in Austin, open Saturdays, most insurance accepted” tells an engine everything. “Your smile is our passion” tells it nothing.

Give each service its own page. Start it with a short answer to the question a customer would type. Then add the details people ask about: price ranges, the areas you serve, your hours and how to book.

Add the questions people ask you on the phone, with short answers, as text on the page. A question with its answer right under it is the easiest thing for an answer engine to lift.

Schema markup helps search engines understand who you are. It is not a shortcut into AI answers. Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that were already cited often in Google’s AI Overviews and then added schema. It found “no major uplift in citations on any platform.” In AI Overviews, their citations fell 4.6% against matched pages, a small but statistically significant drop. [4]

We still add schema to our own pages. Google says it uses structured data to understand the content of a page, and it costs little to add. Just do not count on it to get you quoted. [5]

Why do other sites matter?

The best-known study looked at Google’s AI Overviews, not ChatGPT. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands there. How often a brand was mentioned across the web correlated with its AI visibility at 0.664. Backlinks correlated at only 0.218. Ahrefs notes this is a correlation, not proof of cause. [6]

Real mentions are what count. Google warns that seeking inauthentic mentions “isn’t as helpful as it might seem”. So here is where to start. [8]

• Get listed where your customers already look: your Google Business Profile, review sites in your field and your trade association.
• Ask happy customers for honest reviews. Never tell them what to write.
• Say yes to local press, podcasts and guest articles in your field.
• Answer real questions in the forums your customers use, under your own name, without dropping links.

Does the same work for Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI?

Mostly, yes. Each engine has its own crawler, and each one needs to be let in. Perplexity recommends allowing its PerplexityBot crawler so your site appears in its search results. Anthropic says blocking its Claude-SearchBot may reduce your site’s visibility in Claude’s search results. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode use the normal Google index, so a page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet. [7][9][10]

The rest is the same work: plain answers on your pages and your name on other sites. Our guide to GEO vs SEO shows where Google and the AI engines split, and the AI search optimization guide covers every engine in one place.

Can you pay ChatGPT to recommend your business?

No. ChatGPT now shows ads to some users on its Free and Go plans. OpenAI’s own words: “Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model.” The ads are labeled as sponsored. Anyone who sells you a promised spot in ChatGPT’s answers is selling something they do not control. [11]

How do you check if it is working?

Ask ChatGPT the questions your customers ask. Ask each one a few times, on different days, logged out. Answers change from one run to the next, so one answer proves nothing. Write down whether you were named and which sites it cited.

Then watch your analytics. OpenAI adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends, so visits from ChatGPT show up as their own source. [1]

Our free check reads your site the way AI crawlers do. It shows what blocks AI engines, what is missing, and what to fix first. It does not ask ChatGPT about you.