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How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

No one can make ChatGPT recommend your business, and anyone who sells a guarantee is guessing. What you can do is let ChatGPT’s search crawler read your website, and make your name, address, hours and services correct and identical everywhere.

Owners type this in many ways: how to get my business on ChatGPT, listed, found, ranked, shown or recommended. It is the same job. ChatGPT can only mention a business it can find and read, so the work is about being easy to find and easy to read.

The seven steps

1. Test first, so you know where you start. Ask ChatGPT the five questions in our ten-minute test and write down whether you were named and right, named and wrong, or not named. Look at which websites it links under its answer. Those are pages it appears to have drawn on. If a directory shows up there and you are not on it, or you are listed wrongly, fix that listing.
2. Do not block OpenAI’s search crawler. Open yourdomain.in/robots.txt in your browser. OpenAI says its crawler for ChatGPT search is called OAI-SearchBot, and that sites that opt out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. OpenAI recommends allowing it in robots.txt. If your file says Disallow: / for everyone, or names OAI-SearchBot, ask whoever built your site to change it. OpenAI says such a change can take about 24 hours to be picked up.
3. Know that GPTBot is a different thing. OpenAI treats GPTBot, which collects content that may be used to train its models, as a separate setting from search. You can allow OAI-SearchBot and still disallow GPTBot. Blocking GPTBot is a choice about training, not about whether you can be found.
4. Write your facts as plain text on one page. Name, address, phone, hours, services, and prices if you publish them. Not inside an image, not only in a PDF. Google advises the same for its own AI features: important content should be available in textual form.
5. Make the same facts match everywhere. Your website, your Google Business Profile, Instagram and any directory should show the same address, phone and hours. We cannot see which sources ChatGPT uses for a given answer, so we do not claim that it reads one particular listing. But a wrong listing misleads customers whichever tool reads it. Our Google Business Profile checklist covers the most important one.
6. Add structured data. It states your type, address and hours in a form software can read without guessing. See our schema guide. Mark up only what is visibly on the page.
7. Test again every month and fix wrong facts at the source. Answers change from day to day. If ChatGPT says you close at 6 and you close at 8, find the page that says 6 and correct it.

Checklist

• My robots.txt does not block OAI-SearchBot.
• My hours, address and phone are text on my website.
• They match my Google Business Profile exactly.
• I have a specific schema type (Dentist, HairSalon, CafeOrCoffeeShop) on my homepage.
• I ran the five questions this month and noted the result.

What we cannot tell you

We do not know how ChatGPT ranks one business above another, and we have not found any official OpenAI page that says. So we do not give percentages, timelines or promises. Perplexity is similar: it says its crawler, PerplexityBot, is meant to surface and link websites in its results, and recommends allowing it in robots.txt. Gemini and Google’s AI answers are covered in our AI Overviews guide.