How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business

Nobody can make ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews or any other assistant recommend your business, and anyone who promises it is guessing. What the evidence does support is narrower and more useful: make sure AI search crawlers can reach your site, say plainly on your own pages who you are and what you do, be mentioned by other credible sites, and publish pages that answer real questions with real sources. Most of that is good search practice you should be doing anyway.

This field is new and full of confident claims. Here is what the platforms themselves say, and what the better studies found.

Can AI assistants see your site at all?

Start here, because it is the one thing you fully control.

AI companies run separate crawlers for separate jobs. OpenAI, for example, has OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search and GPTBot for training its models. OpenAI states that sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, while blocking GPTBot only opts you out of training (OpenAI, overview of crawlers). Anthropic makes the same split between ClaudeBot (training) and Claude-SearchBot (search) (Anthropic, crawlers), and Perplexity’s PerplexityBot indexes pages for its search results (Perplexity, bots).

That means you can choose: block training if you want to, and still allow the search crawlers that decide whether you can be cited. Check two places:

Your robots.txt file. Make sure it does not block the search crawlers.
Your host or CDN. Some block AI crawlers at the network level. Cloudflare, for example, blocks training and agent crawlers by default on pages that display ads, for new domains added from 15 September 2026, while leaving search crawlers allowed (Cloudflare). Older settings may differ, so look rather than assume.

Is there special markup or a file you need to add?

No, according to Google. Its guidance for site owners on AI Overviews and AI Mode says: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features” (Google Search Central, AI features and your website). Normal search best practice applies. Microsoft says the same about Bing: its AI answers are grounded on the same index and signals as its search (Bing, the evolving role of the index).

Two popular shortcuts do not hold up:

Schema markup as an AI lever. An Ahrefs study compared 1,885 pages that added structured data with about 4,000 similar pages that did not. Adding schema produced no meaningful increase in citations in ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode, and a small drop in AI Overviews (Ahrefs, schema and AI citations). Correct structured data is still worth having for other reasons; it is just not a way to get cited.
llms.txt. A proposed file for AI tools that the major assistants have not said they read. We cover it in Is llms.txt worth adding to your website?

What seems to matter?

Being mentioned by others

In a study of 75,000 brands, Ahrefs found that how often a brand is mentioned across the web had the strongest relationship with appearing in Google’s AI Overviews (a correlation of 0.664), much stronger than backlinks (0.218) (Ahrefs, brand mentions and AI Overviews). Ahrefs is careful to say correlation is not causation. Still, it points the same way as common sense: assistants repeat what many sources say about you.

For a small organization, mentions come from ordinary things done well: member associations and directories that list you, partners and clients who name you, local press, speaking at events, and being quoted for your expertise.

Saying plainly what you do, on your own site

Assistants summarize. Make the summary easy. Somewhere on your home page and your About page, say in one plain sentence who you are, what you do, for whom, and where. Keep your name, location and services the same everywhere they appear, including profiles on other sites.

Pages that answer real questions, with sources

A research paper on “generative engine optimization” tested rewriting source pages in a lab setting, with an AI system answering questions from the top search results. Adding quotations, statistics and citations to sources made a page noticeably more visible in the generated answers, while stuffing in keywords made it worse (Aggarwal et al., GEO, KDD 2024). It was an experiment on test queries, not a measurement of live ChatGPT recommendations, but it matches what the platforms say they want: clear, well-sourced answers.

In practice: write pages around the questions your clients ask, answer in the first paragraph, and back claims with named sources.

How do you know if it is working?

Ask. Put the questions your clients ask into ChatGPT, Google and Copilot every month, note whether you are mentioned or cited, and keep a simple log. Bing Webmaster Tools now includes a report on how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing’s AI answers (Bing Webmaster Tools, AI performance). Expect it to move slowly; mentions build over months, not weeks.

A short checklist

Allow OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and normal search crawlers in robots.txt and at your host or CDN.
Decide separately whether to allow training crawlers.
State who you are, what you do, for whom and where, in one sentence, on your home and About pages.
Make your name, location and services consistent everywhere.
Answer your clients’ real questions on your site, answer first, with sources.
Earn mentions: directories, associations, partners, press.
Check monthly and keep a log.

Disclosure: GMNI builds websites with this in mind, and Emmanuel leads our search work. None of it is a guarantee, and we would be wary of anyone who offers one.

If you would like us to check whether AI search crawlers can reach your site, schedule a discussion.

Sources (checked 30 September 2026)