How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

More and more customers ask ChatGPT things like "best dentist near me that takes walk-ins" or "which project tool is good for a five-person team". If your business isn't in the answer, you don't get a click to fight for. This guide explains, without hype, where those recommendations come from and the steps that give you a real chance of being named. Nobody can promise you a mention; anyone who does is guessing.

Can you submit your business to ChatGPT?

No. There is no form, listing program or paid placement for ChatGPT's answers. OpenAI documents a crawler, OAI-SearchBot, that finds pages to show in ChatGPT search, and it says that sites which block it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. That crawler, plus the search results ChatGPT pulls from the web, is how your business gets into the answer. Everything below works on those two inputs.

Where does ChatGPT get its business recommendations?

When a question needs current information, ChatGPT searches the web, reads a handful of pages, and writes an answer that cites some of them. Three kinds of sources tend to shape a recommendation:

• Your own site, if ChatGPT's crawler can read it and it clearly matches the question.
• Search results. In a small study by the agency Seer Interactive (February 2025, about 500 citations from about 100 questions), 87% of ChatGPT search citations matched Bing's top 20 results for the same question, against 56% for Google's. It's one study and the product has changed since, but it's a strong hint that Bing matters.
• Other sites that talk about you: review platforms, directories, local news, "best of" lists, forums such as Reddit. An assistant is more willing to recommend a business that several independent pages describe the same way.

Memory and model knowledge play a part too, but for a small business they mostly echo what is already on the web. The practical steps are the same.

Step 1: Can ChatGPT's search crawler read your site?

Open https://yourwebsite.com/robots.txt and look for OAI-SearchBot. If it sits under Disallow: /, or if a User-agent: * group disallows everything, ChatGPT search can't use your pages. Blocking GPTBot is different: that's OpenAI's training crawler, and blocking it doesn't remove you from ChatGPT search. Our guide OAI-SearchBot vs GPTBot vs ChatGPT-User has the exact lines.

Also check your host or CDN. Cloudflare and similar services can block AI bots before they reach your robots.txt; see how to check Cloudflare's AI bot settings.

Step 2: Is your site in Bing?

Search Bing for site:yourwebsite.com. If nothing comes back, Bing hasn't indexed you, and that likely hurts you in ChatGPT and certainly in Microsoft Copilot, which runs on Bing.

1. Create a free Bing Webmaster Tools account and add your site. If your site is already verified in Google Search Console, Bing can import it.
2. Submit your sitemap (usually /sitemap.xml).
3. Turn on IndexNow if your platform supports it, so Bing hears about new and changed pages right away. Cloudflare can send IndexNow pings for you with its Crawler Hints setting, and many CMS plugins do it too.

We went through this ourselves: on October 19, 2026, a week after dottpace.com went live, Bing had not indexed it yet. New sites wait; the steps above shorten the wait, they don't remove it.

Step 3: Does your site say what you do, where, and for whom?

Assistants match a question to pages that answer it plainly. A home page that says "We craft experiences that matter" doesn't tell anyone you're a family dentist in Round Rock who sees children and takes walk-ins. Check that these appear as text, not only in images:

• What you sell or do, in the words customers use ("emergency plumber", "Shopify subscription app").
• Where you work: city, neighborhoods or service area, and your address if customers visit.
• Who it's for and what makes you different, in one or two concrete sentences.
• Prices or price ranges, hours, policies, and how to book or buy.
• One page per main service, with the details a buyer asks about.

Keep facts identical everywhere: your site, your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook and directories. When sources disagree on hours or addresses, assistants repeat whichever version they found, and sometimes the wrong one.

How you write matters too. In the GEO research paper (Aggarwal et al., presented at KDD 2024), adding quotations, statistics and cited sources to a page raised its visibility in AI answers by roughly 28–43% on the paper's main measure, while keyword stuffing scored below doing nothing. Specific facts beat repeated keywords.

Step 4: Are you mentioned where ChatGPT looks?

You can't control what others write, but you can make it easier for them to mention you accurately:

• Reviews. Ask happy customers to review you on the platforms that matter in your field: Google, Yelp, Tripadvisor, G2 or Capterra for software, Houzz for home services.
• Directories and associations. Chamber of commerce, trade associations, local business directories, industry listings. Use the same name, address and description on each.
• Lists and comparisons. "Best X in [city]" and "best tools for Y" pages are often cited. Find the ones that already rank, check that their facts about you are right, and ask to be considered if you belong there.
• Communities. Answer real questions in your field where your customers ask them. Be useful first; promotional posts get removed and remembered.
• Local press and partners. A short feature, a supplier's "where to buy" page or an event listing are all independent mentions.

Step 5: What does ChatGPT say about you today?

1. Open ChatGPT in a Temporary Chat (or logged out), so your history and memory don't color the answer.
2. Ask the questions a customer would ask, without your name: "Who's a good [service] in [city]?", "What's the best [product] for [need]?"
3. Note who's named, which sites are cited, and whether any facts about you are wrong.
4. Then ask about you by name: "What do you know about [business] in [city]?" Wrong facts usually trace back to an old listing.
5. Repeat monthly with the same questions. Answers vary from run to run, so look at the pattern across several runs, not one answer.

Dottpace AI Search runs this every week on the questions you choose, across ChatGPT and six other assistants, and shows who they name instead of you.

What doesn't help?

• An llms.txt file. No major assistant says it uses one to choose what to recommend. See does llms.txt work?
• Keyword stuffing. Repeating "best plumber Austin" scored worse than doing nothing in the GEO study.
• Paying for a "ChatGPT listing". No such listing exists. Services that sell one are selling directory links or guesses.
• Fake reviews or self-written "best of" lists. They break platform rules and FTC rules on fake reviews, and they don't hold up when an assistant compares sources.
• Blocking GPTBot to "protect" your site, or unblocking it to "get in". GPTBot is for training; it doesn't decide search visibility either way.

How long does it take?

Honest answer: weeks to months, and there's no guarantee. Unblocking a crawler can take effect within about a day of the bot rereading your robots.txt. Getting indexed in Bing can take days to weeks for a new site. Reviews and mentions build over months. What you can measure early is whether bots can read you, whether you're indexed, and whether your facts are right everywhere. Mentions in answers follow those.

If you're a service business, the same steps also feed Google's map results and AI Overviews, so the work pays twice.

Sources

• OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers (OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT search).
• Seer Interactive, 87% of SearchGPT citations match Bing's top results (February 6, 2025).
• Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024).
• IndexNow, documentation; Cloudflare, Crawler Hints.