How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business

When someone asks ChatGPT for "the best accountant for freelancers in Leeds" or "a CRM for a small agency", it usually names a handful of businesses. Nobody can make ChatGPT name them. What you can do is make it easy for ChatGPT to find you, understand what you do, and see other sites agree you're a good answer.

Can you rank #1 in ChatGPT?

Not in the way you rank on Google. There's no fixed list where your business sits at position three. ChatGPT writes a new answer each time, and the same question asked twice often names different businesses. So "ranking in ChatGPT" really means being named in more of the answers to the questions your customers ask. That's something you can measure and improve, which is what the steps below are for.

How ChatGPT picks businesses

For questions about products, services and places, ChatGPT usually searches the web before it answers. OpenAI says ChatGPT search "leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by our partners", and its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, collects pages for it. The pages it finds can shape which businesses it names, and the links under the answer show which pages it used. OpenAI doesn't publish exactly how it chooses.

When it doesn't search, it answers from what it learned in training, which favours businesses that were already written about a lot. That's harder to change, and slower.

So in practice there are two jobs: be one of the pages it finds, and be named on the other pages it finds.

1. Find out where you stand

Ask ChatGPT the questions your customers would ask. Use a private browser window, signed out, so your own history doesn't shape the answer. Write down who it names and which pages it links to.

Then ask again. The same question often gets a different list: in our own scans of local businesses, ChatGPT named about a third of the businesses in only one of two answers to the same question. One answer is a sample, not a verdict.

This is what Glowsearch does every week, if you'd rather not do it by hand.

2. Let it read your site

Make sure ChatGPT's search can reach your pages.

• Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt. OpenAI says sites that block it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers". GPTBot is a different crawler, for training; you can block it and still appear in search. Changes take about a day. More on OAI-SearchBot.
• Check your firewall or CDN. Some bot-protection settings block AI crawlers even when robots.txt allows them.
• Put your text in the HTML. If your pages only show their content after JavaScript runs, a crawler may see an empty page.
• Be in Bing. OpenAI names Bing as one of ChatGPT search's providers. Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools; it takes ten minutes.

3. Say what you do, plainly

The assistant matches the question to pages that answer it. If a customer asks for "a family dentist in Leeds who does Saturday appointments", the dentist whose site says all of that in words is easier to name than one whose homepage says "Smile with confidence".

• Your homepage should say what you do, for whom and where, in the first lines.
• Give each service, product or use case its own page.
• Put your prices or price ranges on the site. People ask "cheap" and "affordable", and assistants repeat prices they can find.
• Answer the questions customers ask you, on the page where they belong.
• For software, write honest comparison pages with your main competitors and an "alternatives to" page. Buyers ask for those, and assistants cite them.

4. Get onto the pages it cites

Look at the links under ChatGPT's answers for your questions. They're usually some mix of your competitors' own sites, "best of" articles, review sites and directories, and forum threads.

• Lists and articles: contact the author or publisher, explain what you do and why you belong on the list. If you pay for a spot, it should be labelled as paid: undisclosed paid placements break most sites' rules and advertising law in many countries.
• Review sites and directories: claim and complete your profile. In software, that's G2, Capterra and the like. For local services, it's the directories for your trade and city.
• Forum threads: where people ask for recommendations, reply as yourself, say you're the owner, and be useful. Assistants cite Reddit often.

5. Make your facts agree

If your site says you open at 8, your Google listing says 9 and a directory has your old address, the assistant has to guess. Keep your name, address, hours, prices and services the same everywhere. Ask ChatGPT what it knows about your business, and fix the pages behind anything wrong.

6. Measure, and be patient

Pages get crawled, lists get updated and new threads appear over weeks, not days. Check the same questions every week or two, the same way each time, and compare against your competitors. If everyone's numbers drop at once, the assistant may have changed, or it may be chance; look closer before blaming your own site.

What doesn't help

• llms.txt. No major assistant has said it uses it. More on llms.txt.
• Writing for robots. Keyword-stuffed pages or hidden text help no one.
• Fake reviews. They break the review sites' rules and can get you removed from the very pages you want to be on.

For what ChatGPT actually links, see where ChatGPT gets its information, and for how much reviews matter, our study of 2,035 businesses. For a complete list to work through, see the AI visibility checklist. If an assistant keeps naming one particular competitor, here's how to work out why.