How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business?

RushilFounder, Ru Visibility2 October 2026

Short answer

You can't make ChatGPT recommend you, and anyone promising that is guessing. What you can do is make sure ChatGPT's search crawler is allowed to read your site, that your pages say exactly what you do, for whom and where, and that other websites back that up.

1. Let ChatGPT's search crawler in

When ChatGPT searches the web, it relies on OpenAI's crawler, OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI is direct about what blocking it does: “Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links” (OpenAI).

If your robots.txt file has a rule like this, ChatGPT search can't use your pages:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Blocking OpenAI's training crawler, GPTBot, is a separate choice. OpenAI says “each setting is independent of the others”, so you can keep your content out of training and still appear in search answers.

2. Say what you do in plain words

ChatGPT can only describe you accurately if your pages describe you accurately. Spell out the services you offer, the towns or areas you cover, who you are best for, and roughly what things cost. If you are good with nervous patients, rush jobs or small budgets, say so in those words; that is exactly the kind of detail people put in their questions.

3. Be easy to recognize as one business

Use the same business name, address and phone number everywhere: your site, your Google Business Profile, directories, social profiles. Link those profiles from your website. When the details match, it is easy to tell they all describe you; when they don't, you look like several smaller, less certain businesses.

4. Get other people talking about you

Recommendations lean on outside evidence: reviews, local press, your industry association, partners and lists of providers. This is the slowest part, and the one that can't be faked. Research on AI answers also found that content with citations, statistics and quotations was more visible in them, by up to 40% in the authors' tests (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024).

5. Check, then check again

Ask ChatGPT the questions your customers ask, several times and in fresh chats, and note whether you come up. Answers vary from one person and one moment to the next, so judge by how often you appear over weeks, not by a single reply.

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.