How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

ChatGPT recommends businesses that are named on the pages it reads when a buyer asks. To be recommended, your business must be named on those pages, and your own website must be open to ChatGPT's search crawler.

Here are the steps, in order.

1. Find out what ChatGPT says today

Ask ChatGPT the questions your buyers ask. Do not ask "what is [your brand]". Ask the way a buyer asks: "best [your service] in [your city]".

Write down 3 things for each answer:

• the businesses it names
• the order it names them in
• the pages it cites as sources

Then ask the same questions in Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok. Each one reads different sources, so each one can give a different answer.

The pages they cite are your target list. Every step below is about getting named on those pages, or becoming one of them.

2. Let the AI crawlers into your website

OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and check that none of these is blocked:

• OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search)
• ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot (Claude)
• PerplexityBot (Perplexity)
• Googlebot (Google and Gemini)

Also check your firewall. Some hosting and security services block AI crawlers by default, even when robots.txt allows them.

3. Get your site into Bing and Google

ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity search the web before they answer. If a search engine cannot find your pages, the AI cannot read them.

• Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. Turn on IndexNow so Bing hears about new pages the same day.
• Verify your site in Google Search Console and submit your sitemap.

Both are free.

4. Get onto the lists ChatGPT reads

About 44% of the pages ChatGPT cited for software, product and agency questions were "best X" lists (Ahrefs, December 2025, 26,283 source pages). Our own scan agrees: on 7 October 2026, across 750 answers from the five platforms, addresses containing "best" were cited 828 times.

So:

• List your business on the directories in your category. Most accept a free listing you create yourself.
• Publish your own list for your category on your own site. Be fair: name the real options, with real prices. The same Ahrefs study found that businesses that put themselves on their own list were still cited.

5. Get your name mentioned across the web

Across 75,000 brands, mentions on other websites matched AI Overview visibility more closely than backlinks did: a correlation of 0.664 for mentions against 0.218 for links (Ahrefs, May 2025). That is a correlation, not proof of cause, but it points the same way as step 4: the AI platforms repeat what other websites say.

Places where your name can appear without asking anyone:

• directories and review sites in your category
• your own articles on LinkedIn and Medium
• answers to real questions on Reddit and Quora, where you say who you are
• your company profiles on Crunchbase, LinkedIn and X

6. Publish one page for each buyer question

Make the buyer's question the title of the page. Answer it in the first two sentences. Then give the steps, with numbers and dates.

One page answers one question. A page that tries to answer five is rarely cited for any of them.

This matters more than it looks. On 7 October 2026 we asked the five platforms 18 "how do I get named" questions, 90 answers in all. Only 10 of the 90 answers named any tool or company; the rest cited guides and blog posts and answered in their own words. On "how" questions, the page that gets cited is the one that answers plainly.

Here is one example. On 7 October 2026 we asked the five platforms the question in the title of this page: "How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?" No platform named a business or a tool. Claude and Gemini showed no sources for it. Grok cited 10 pages, ChatGPT 7 and Perplexity 16: 33 pages on 30 different websites. 30 of the 33 pages had "recommend" or "ChatGPT" in the address, so most of them were guides written for this exact question. Only two websites were cited by two platforms. For your business, the lesson is the same: write the page for the question your buyer asks, and answer it in the first two sentences.

7. Update your key pages

75% of pages cited by AI platforms had been updated in the past year (Seer Interactive, July 2026, 47,000 citations).

Review your most important pages every month. Change the "updated" date only when the content really changes.

8. Measure every week

AI answers change from week to week. Ask the same questions every week and record who is named. This is how you see which of your changes worked.

What does not help

• llms.txt. In a log study of 137,000 domains, 97% of llms.txt files received no requests at all (Ahrefs, June 2026). Google says you do not need special AI files.
• Buying links or reviews. It breaks the rules of every major platform.
• Asking ChatGPT to remember you. What you type in your own chat does not change what it tells other people.

Limits

Nobody can promise that ChatGPT will name you, or a date: the AI platforms read the web on their own schedule. Our numbers come from one run on 7 October 2026, asked as a buyer in the UAE through each platform's API, and those answers can differ from the apps on a phone. The data shows what the AI platforms named and cited that day, not why. Measure every week; your weekly record shows whether anything changed.

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