How to Get Recommended by ChatGPT: 7 Steps for B2B Companies

To get recommended by ChatGPT, make sure its search crawler can read your site, then publish clear pages that answer your buyers' exact questions. After that, get your company mentioned on the sites ChatGPT draws on, and check every week which answers name you.

There's no form to fill in and no fee to pay. ChatGPT names the companies it can find, understand and trust for a given question. Your job is to be all three.

Why being recommended by ChatGPT matters now

Sam Altman said at OpenAI's DevDay in October 2025 that ChatGPT had more than 800 million weekly users. Many of them are your buyers.

B2B buyers now use these tools while they shop. A 2025 report from 6sense found that 94% of B2B buyers use large language models such as ChatGPT during their buying journey. When a buyer asks "which tools should I look at for X?", the answer is a short list. If you're not on it, you may never hear from that buyer.

If you're new to the idea, our guide to what generative engine optimization is covers the basics. This post is the practical how-to.

How ChatGPT decides who to recommend

ChatGPT answers in two ways. Sometimes it answers from what it learned in training. Often, for buying questions, it searches the web and cites the pages it found.

You can influence both, but in different ways:

How ChatGPT answers	What it relies on	What you can do
From training	What the web said about you when the model was trained	Be mentioned widely and consistently over time
From live search	Pages its search can reach today	Let the crawler in, publish pages that answer the question
Either way	How clearly your company is described	Say plainly what you do, for whom, and what it costs

The search side moves fastest. A new page can be found and cited soon after it goes live. Training data changes slowly, so mentions you earn now pay off later too.

Step 1: Let ChatGPT's search crawler in

OpenAI runs a crawler called OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI's documentation says that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers". It recommends allowing it in your site's robots.txt file.

Check this first, because it's a five-minute fix. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for any line that blocks OAI-SearchBot. Ask whoever runs your website to check the firewall and bot-blocking settings too. Some security tools block AI crawlers by default.

OpenAI also says changes can take about 24 hours to take effect.

Step 2: Write down the questions your buyers ask

List 15 to 20 questions a buyer might type before they'd buy from you. Group them into three kinds:

• "Best" questions: "best invoicing software for a design studio with 20 staff"
• "Versus" questions: "Xero vs QuickBooks for a UK consultancy"
• Problem questions: "how do I stop late payments from clients"

Ask each one in ChatGPT with search turned on. Note which companies get named and which pages get cited. This list becomes your plan. It shows where you're missing, and who is taking your place.

Step 3: Publish the page that answers each question

For every question where you should be named and aren't, write one page that answers it better than anything else online.

Pages that get quoted share a few habits:

• The answer comes first. Put a direct answer in the first two sentences. Explain afterwards.
• One question per page. A page that tries to answer ten questions answers none of them clearly.
• Facts with sources. The paper that coined the term GEO found that adding citations, quotations and statistics made pages more visible in AI answers. It reported gains of up to 40% in its tests.
• Tables and lists. Comparisons, prices and steps are easier to quote when they're laid out clearly.
• Honest comparisons. If a competitor suits some buyers better, say so. A fair page is more useful, and more likely to be trusted.

This also helps on Google. Google says there are no special requirements to appear in its AI Overviews beyond its usual advice. That means helpful content, crawlable pages and important content in text.

Step 4: Describe your company the same way everywhere

ChatGPT can only recommend you for the right questions if it knows what you do. Vague homepages make that hard.

On your own site, state these plainly, in words a buyer would use:

• what you sell, in one sentence
• who it's for, by industry, size or role
• what it costs, or at least where pricing starts
• where you operate
• how you're different from the obvious alternatives

Then make your listings match. Your LinkedIn page, review site profiles, directory entries and partner pages should all describe you the same way. Conflicting descriptions give an assistant reasons to leave you out, or to describe you wrongly.

Step 5: Get mentioned on sites ChatGPT trusts

Your own site is only one voice. Assistants also weigh what others say about you.

There's useful evidence from Google's side. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that mentions of a brand across the web correlated with AI Overview visibility at 0.664. Backlinks correlated at only 0.218. That study looked at Google, not ChatGPT, but the lesson is the same: being talked about matters.

Places worth your time:

• review sites in your category, with recent reviews from real customers
• "best X" round-ups and comparison articles that your buyers read
• industry publications, podcasts and newsletters
• community discussions where buyers ask for recommendations, answered honestly
• partner and integration directories

Look back at the pages ChatGPT cited in Step 2. Those are the sites it already trusts for your questions. Start there.

Step 6: Keep pages fresh and correct

Out-of-date pages cost you twice. An old price or retired feature can be repeated in answers, and newer pages from competitors may be preferred.

Put a "last updated" date on key pages. Review your pricing, product and comparison pages every quarter. When something changes, update every page and listing that mentions it, not just the homepage.

Step 7: Check the answers every week

Answers change as models update, competitors publish and new sources appear. Ask your question list again every week, in the same way, and keep a simple record:

Question	Named?	Position	Pages cited	Change since last week
best X for Y	Yes	3rd of 5	Your comparison page, a review site	Up from not named

Over a few months this shows which pages are working, and which questions still need one.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Blocking the crawler by accident. It's the most common reason a good site never gets cited.
• Writing for the algorithm instead of the buyer. Stuffed keywords and padded pages don't get quoted.
• Chasing one big answer. Being named for twenty specific questions beats chasing one broad one.
• Making claims you can't back up. Assistants, and buyers, discount pages that don't show their sources.
• Stopping after one round. This is weekly work, like SEO, not a one-off project.

How to get my business listed in ChatGPT

There is no form to submit and no paid listing for organic answers. "Getting listed" means being findable and trusted. Steps 1 to 4 are the way in.

How to get cited in ChatGPT

A citation is a link to your page in the answer. Pages get cited when they answer the exact question clearly. Short definitions, comparison tables and specific numbers help. Pages behind logins or heavy scripts are harder to read.

FAQ

Can I pay to be mentioned in ChatGPT?

You cannot pay for placement in ChatGPT's organic answers. Mentions come from what it finds and trusts.

How long does it take to show up in ChatGPT?

It varies. Search-based answers can change soon after pages are crawled. Answers based on training change more slowly.

Does SEO help with ChatGPT?

Yes. Clear, crawlable, well-linked pages help both search rankings and AI citations.

Does llms.txt help with ChatGPT?

There is little evidence that ChatGPT reads llms.txt today. Crawler access and clear pages matter more.

How do I know if ChatGPT mentions my business?

Ask your buyers' questions in ChatGPT regularly and record the results. Use the same wording each time.

Get recommended without doing it all yourself

This is the work our AI search coworker does every week. It asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude what your buyers ask, records who gets named, and hands the gaps to the writers on the team. Your team approves every page before it goes live. See how it works on our generative engine optimization page.

This post was written by our AI search coworker with Abhishek, our founder, and approved before it was published, like everything on this blog.