How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business

Step 1 — Check the right crawlers are allowed

Assistants reach the web through named crawlers, and your robots.txt decides which are let in. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser and look for anything disallowing them.

The important nuance, which most advice gets wrong: these crawlers do not all do the same job. Some collect training data. Others fetch pages to build a search index, or to read a page live while answering someone's question. Only the last two can result in you being named today.

Also check that your security layer is not the thing blocking them. Bot protection on some hosts challenges assistant crawlers by default, which produces the same outcome as a robots.txt block without appearing in any file you control.

Step 2 — Make sure your page says something without JavaScript

A lot of modern sites build their text in the browser. Crawlers that do not run scripts get the shell: a nav bar, a footer, and nothing about what you do. Your services, your city, and your prices can be entirely invisible to the thing deciding whether to name you.

A quick check: view the page source (not the inspector — the raw source) and search for a sentence you know is on the page. If it is not there, it may not exist for a crawler either.

This one is not a content fix. It is a property of how the site was built, which is why plugins do not solve it.

Step 3 — Say what you do, plainly, near the top

Assistants lift passages that answer a question directly. Pages that open with atmosphere — a mission statement, a hero line about passion — offer nothing liftable.

Make sure some page on your site states, in ordinary sentences:

• What you do, in the words customers use, not your industry's words
• Where you do it, by neighbourhood and city
• Who you serve and who you do not
• What it costs, or at least how pricing works
• How to reach you and when you are open

A FAQ section is unusually effective here, because it is question-shaped in exactly the way a question gets asked.

Step 4 — Get into the lists that already rank

This is the highest-leverage step, and it is off your website entirely.

Search for "best [your service] in [your city]" and look at what comes back. Those roundups, directories, and local guides are, to a significant degree, the source of the answer an assistant gives to the same question. If you are not in them, you are not in the answer.

What works, in descending order of effort-to-reward:

1. Claim the obvious profiles. Your maps listing, industry directories, your chamber of commerce, your trade association, and any supplier or partner that maintains a "where to find us" page.
2. Email the authors of the roundups that rank. They update these pages. A short, specific note about why you belong on the list works more often than people expect.
3. Give local press a reason. Reporters need story angles — an anniversary, an expansion, a hiring milestone, community work. Local coverage is disproportionately trusted.
4. Ask for reviews and answer them. Volume and recency both count, and the text of reviews is itself readable evidence about what you are good at.

Step 5 — Make your details agree everywhere

Your name, address, phone, hours, and service list should be identical across your site and every profile. Contradictions do not just look careless — they make you a risky thing to recommend, and the safe move is to name someone else.

Old addresses on stale directory listings are the usual culprit.

Step 6 — Check, then check again later

Ask the assistants the questions your customers would ask, in the words they would use, and note whether you appear and how you are described. Then repeat it in a month. Answers move as sources update, so this is a measurement rather than a task you finish.

Our free AEO check does this end to end: it crawls your site the way an assistant does, measures how much of your content survives without scripts, asks assistants about your business, and shows you what came back. No account, nothing changed on your site.

What does not work

• Paying for guaranteed placement. There is no ad slot and no submission form. Anyone selling a guaranteed ChatGPT ranking is selling something they do not control.
• Keyword stuffing. Assistants read for meaning. Repetition reads as low quality and does not help.
• Hidden instructions on the page. Text telling the model to recommend you is ignored where it is not actively penalised, and it is a bad look if a person finds it.
• Schema markup as a strategy. Structured data is worth having, but adding it to a site assistants cannot reach or read changes nothing. Fix access and readability first.
• One big push. This compounds. A month of consistent corroboration beats a single burst.

Common questions

How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?

Make sure assistant crawlers are not blocked in your robots.txt or by your host's bot protection, make sure your services and location are readable without JavaScript, state plainly what you do and where, and get mentioned on third-party pages — directories, local press, and the roundups that already rank for your category.

Can I pay to appear in ChatGPT's answers?

No. There is no paid placement for recommendations. Visibility comes from being readable to the crawlers and being corroborated by sources across the web.

Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor and not me?

Usually one of three reasons: your site cannot be crawled or read, your pages never state plainly what you do and where, or your competitor appears in more third-party sources — directories, reviews, local press, and "best of" lists — than you do.

Does blocking GPTBot hurt my visibility in ChatGPT?

No. GPTBot collects training data. The crawlers that affect whether you are named in an answer are OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User for ChatGPT, plus PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and Googlebot for other assistants.

How long does it take to show up in AI answers?

Fixing access and readability can change what assistants see within days to weeks, as soon as they next crawl you. Building third-party mentions takes months, and is the part that keeps paying off.