How to get your business mentioned by ChatGPT (2026)

The short answer: your business gets mentioned by ChatGPT when the assistant searches the web and finds clear, crawlable pages about you that other sources confirm. In practice: let the assistants' search crawlers in (OAI-SearchBot above all), make sure your pages are indexed in both Google and Bing, publish pages that answer customers' questions directly (what you do, where, for whom, at what price), and build consistent mentions outside your site: Google Business Profile, Bing Places, directories, reviews, press. There is no fee that buys you into the answers, and nobody can guarantee a position.

Below: how assistants choose their sources, what to change on your site step by step, how to measure whether you appear, and which promises to ignore.

Why this matters now

In the EU, 32.7% of people aged 16 to 74 used generative AI tools in the previous three months, according to Eurostat's 2025 survey, the first year it asked the question. Among 16 to 24 year olds it was 64%. That is not yet the majority of buyers, but it is a growing share of people who ask "which accounting firm would you recommend in Lyon?" or "who builds booking apps for clinics?" straight to an assistant instead of typing it into Google.

When the answer names three businesses, you want to be one of them. The good news is that the work is mostly the same work that makes you findable in search, done properly.

How an assistant decides which business to name

An assistant such as ChatGPT answers in one of two ways:

1. From memory. The model was trained on public text up to a cut-off date. If your business was widely written about before then, the model can name it without searching. You cannot change this quickly.
2. By searching the web. For questions about prices, local providers or anything that depends on current information, the assistant runs a search, reads a handful of pages and builds the answer from them, with links to its sources. This is the part you can influence, and it is where most local and niche recommendations come from.

Each platform uses its own crawlers. The ones that matter for visibility:

The practical conclusion: "AI SEO" (also sold as GEO, generative engine optimization) is not a separate discipline. Google says plainly that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: the page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet in normal results. If your site does not show up in Google and Bing, it very likely does not show up in the assistants either.

Step 1: check the assistants are allowed in

This is the cheapest check and, surprisingly often, the real problem. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for rules that block the crawlers above. A setup that keeps search open but refuses training looks like this:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

What to know:

• Blocking GPTBot does not remove you from ChatGPT. OpenAI says GPTBot is for training its foundation models, while search uses OAI-SearchBot. You can refuse one and allow the other.
• Blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from ChatGPT's sources. OpenAI's documentation says sites that opt out will not appear in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still show up as plain navigational links.
• It is not only robots.txt. Firewalls, WordPress security plugins and CDN "bot protection" settings can block AI crawlers by default. If someone "hardened" your site, ask what they blocked.
• The content has to be in the page. If prices or services only appear after heavy JavaScript runs, inside images or in scanned PDFs, some crawlers will not see them.

Step 2: get indexed in Google and in Bing

Most businesses only check Google. For assistants, Bing matters just as much: Copilot grounds its answers in Bing, and Bing now tells you how often you are cited (see the measurement section below).

1. Add your site to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing lets you import a site straight from Search Console in a few minutes.
2. Submit your sitemap in both.
3. Check your important pages one by one: are they indexed? If not, read the reason each tool reports.

Step 3: pages an assistant can cite

The assistant is looking for a page that answers the exact question. If someone asks "how much does a bathroom renovation cost in Manchester" and your only page says "quality services at competitive prices", there is nothing to cite.

What works, in the order I would do it:

• One page per important service, with what it includes, the area you cover, who it is for and how to order it.
• Visible prices or price ranges. "From 1,500 EUR" or "between X and Y depending on size" beats nothing. Cost questions are among the most common ones people ask.
• The answer first. The first sentence under the heading answers the question, details come after. This article is written the same way.
• Business details that match everywhere: name, address, phone, opening hours, company number. Mismatches between your site, Google and directories lead to wrong answers.
• Real FAQs, taken from what customers ask you on the phone, not invented for search.
• Something only you can say. Google advises against "commodity content" and says: don't just recycle what others on the internet have already said. First-hand experience, your own numbers, your own process: that is what gets cited.

Structured data and llms.txt: useful, not magic

Structured data (schema.org markup for your organisation, services, products and FAQs) helps search engines understand a page, and we recommend it. Still, Google states that structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add.

llms.txt is a Markdown file that summarises a site for language models. It is a 2024 proposal, adopted by many sites, but not an official standard. On the same page Google says you do not need AI text files to appear in Google Search, that Google Search does not use them, and that creating one will neither harm nor help. If someone sells you "ChatGPT optimisation" that consists only of llms.txt and schema, you are paying for the small part of the problem.

Step 4: mentions outside your website

Your site says what you say about yourself. Assistants look for confirmation elsewhere. An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found that branded web mentions had the strongest correlation with appearing in Google AI Overviews (0.664), far above the number of backlinks (0.218). The authors themselves note that correlation is not causation, but the signal fits how search-based answers work.

In practice:

• A complete Google Business Profile: correct categories, services, hours, photos, replies to reviews. Google says Business Profiles and Merchant Center can help your products and services be visible in AI responses as well as in regular results.
• Bing Places for Business, for the same reason on the Microsoft side. It is free.
• Genuine reviews on Google and the platforms that matter in your field. Do not buy reviews: platforms remove them, and a profile caught with fake reviews loses exactly the trust you were after.
• Relevant directories and lists: professional associations, chambers of commerce, niche platforms (Clutch or similar for agencies, booking platforms for hotels, appointment platforms for clinics).
• Press, podcasts and partners that write about you and use your correct name.
• Answers in communities where your customers ask questions, written by a real person from the company, not ads.

How to measure whether you appear

There is no single dashboard for every assistant yet, but there are four good, free sources.

The manual test

Write 10 to 15 questions a customer who does not know you would ask: "which [service] company do you recommend in [city]", "how much does [service] cost in [city]", "what is the difference between [option A] and [option B]". Ask them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity with web search on, and log in a spreadsheet who gets named and which sources are cited. Repeat monthly with the same questions. Answers vary from run to run, so watch the trend, not one result.

Note separately whether you are only named (that comes from the model's memory) or cited with a link (that comes from search): they are different problems. Paid tools such as Otterly.ai or Peec AI automate the same test once the question list grows.

Look hardest at the sources cited for your competitors. They show you what kind of page the assistant prefers for that question.

Your analytics

ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to links it sends to websites, as OpenAI explains in its publishers and developers FAQ, so ChatGPT search traffic is visible in Google Analytics or any similar tool. Also look for referrals from perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and gemini.google.com.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Since February 2026 Bing has an AI Performance report, in public preview. It shows how often your pages are cited as sources in Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, which pages are cited, and a sample of the queries the AI used to find them. It is the most direct public measurement of its kind.

Google Search Console

Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are included in the Performance report under the "Web" search type, mixed with regular results. You cannot separate them, but you can see whether your pages gain or lose impressions.

Honest limits

• You cannot buy a recommendation. OpenAI has a separate crawler, OAI-AdsBot, that only visits pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT. Ads exist, but they are kept apart from the organic answer.
• Nobody can guarantee you appear. Answers change with the wording, the user's location and the moment. Google itself says indexing and serving are not guaranteed. An agency promising "position one in ChatGPT" is promising something it does not control.
• The model's memory moves slowly. What it learned about you in training only updates with new model versions.
• Competition still matters. In a small town with few providers you can appear quickly. In a crowded niche in a capital city it is as hard as ranking in Google.
• Assistants make mistakes. They can confuse you with a similarly named business or quote an old price. The only fix is sources that are current and consistent.

Checklist

1. Check robots.txt and your security settings: OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot and Bingbot have access.
2. Add the site to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, submit the sitemap.
3. Confirm your service pages are indexed in both.
4. Write one page per important service, with the answer in the first sentence.
5. Show prices or price ranges wherever you can.
6. Make your business details identical on your site, Google Business Profile, Bing Places and directories.
7. Complete Google Business Profile and reply to reviews.
8. Add structured data for your organisation, services and FAQs.
9. Earn three to five genuine mentions outside your site over the next few months.
10. Run the same 10 to 15 questions in the assistants every month and log the results.

If your current site cannot do these things (new pages, structured data, fast loading on mobile), the problem is the site, not AI. See how much a website costs to know what to expect, and if you sell products, what an online store costs.

How we work

Promptify is a Romanian studio that builds websites, online stores, web platforms and mobile apps, and launches its own products too, from autostudio.one to apps published on the App Store and Google Play. Our page on AI assistant apps explains how we approach AI SEO and apps inside ChatGPT and Claude. For your project, use the AI estimator on our home page to get a range, then ask for a detailed quote, free.