How does ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?

RushilFounder, Ru Visibility2 October 2026

Short answer

OpenAI doesn't publish how ChatGPT picks which businesses to name. What is known is where its material comes from: what the model learned in training, and, when it searches, the pages its crawlers can reach. Businesses that material describes clearly and consistently are the ones it can name with confidence.

Two places ChatGPT gets its knowledge

Training. The model learned from a large body of text before it was released. OpenAI collects some of that with a crawler called GPTBot, and says that disallowing it “indicates a site's content should not be used in training generative AI foundation models”. What a model learned this way stays fixed until a newer model replaces it.

Search. For some questions, ChatGPT searches the web while it answers. OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot “is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features”, and a separate agent, ChatGPT-User, opens pages when a user's request needs them (OpenAI).

What makes a business easy to recommend

Without a published formula, the honest answer comes from what the tool can work with. It is easier to name a business when:

its pages can be fetched and state plainly what it does and where;
the same facts appear on its site, its Google Business Profile and directories;
other sources, such as reviews, press and associations, say similar things about it;
its pages answer the specific question asked, rather than hinting at it.

Research supports the content side. The paper that named generative engine optimization found that adding citations, statistics and quotations raised content's visibility in AI answers by up to 40% in its tests, with results that “vary across domains” ( Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024).

Why the answer changes

Ask the same question twice and you may get different businesses. Wording, location, what the person asked before and updates to the tool all play a part. That is why a single test means little. The useful measure is how often you appear across many asks, and whether what is said about you is right.

What we would ignore

Anyone claiming to know the exact formula, or to guarantee a mention, is selling certainty that doesn't exist. The things above are dull, but they are what the tool can actually see.

Sources

Find out what AI says about you.

Send us your web address. We run our own tool on it, free, and send you what it says. The whole thing — not a taster with the useful bits taken out.

Whether AI can even read your site

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google and Bing all send a small program to read your pages. We knock on your door as each one and see who gets let in. If they are being turned away, nothing else matters until that is fixed.

Two scores out of 100 — one for Google, one for AI

Plus what is behind each number. Where we could only make a fair guess, we say so instead of dressing it up as a measurement.

A list of fixes, best one first

Ordered by what gives you the most for the least work, so the top of the list is the quickest win. It is yours either way — use it with us or without us.

We ran it on our own site too. It told us what we were getting wrong, and we published that. A tool you will not point at yourself is not worth much.

One thing the free check does not do: actually ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for businesses like yours, dozens of times, and count how often your name comes up. That costs us real money each time we run it, so it comes with paid work.