How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

Getting a business named in ChatGPT's answers is the core of AI SEO, also called generative engine optimisation (GEO). Nobody controls what ChatGPT says, and anyone who promises a recommendation is guessing. What you can control is whether your website gives ChatGPT something clear and current to find and quote. This guide covers what you can do on your own website.

How does ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?

An answer draws on two things: what the model learned in training, and what it finds if it searches the web while answering.

• It doesn't always search. In one 45-day study covered by a July 2026 review, 57.8% of repeated ChatGPT runs did not search the web at all. On runs like those, a business the model didn't learn about in training can't be named, whatever its website says.
• When it does search, it reads more than one index. An analysis by Peec AI, which OpenAI has not confirmed, found that ChatGPT blends its own search index with results from Google, Microsoft and other outside providers. A page that is well indexed in the main search engines has more chances to be found.

So the practical goal is to be the clearest page on the web for the specific questions your buyers ask, and to make sure that page can be found.

Why do narrow questions come first?

Because that's where a business without a big reputation can win. Ahrefs launched a new conference brand, published pages about it, and tracked AI answers from February to May 2026:

• The new brand appeared in 66.4% of answers to the narrower question ("best SEO conferences 2026"), against 15.8% for the broader one ("best marketing conferences 2026").
• Of the new mentions it won in answers that hadn't named it before, 82% came in answers that cited one of its own pages.

"Best accounting firm" is a question that large, well-known firms already own. "Accounting firm that handles tax registration for a two-person company" is a question few pages answer directly. Start with the narrow ones.

What should each page say?

Write one page for each question that matters, and make it easy to quote:

• Answer in the first two or three sentences. Say plainly what you do, for whom, and what it costs, or how pricing works.
• Use specifics a reader can check: what's included, who it suits and who it doesn't, prices, dates, numbers with their source.
• Use the buyer's own words for headings, phrased as the follow-up questions they ask.
• Keep it current and show the date it was last updated.

Our guide to writing content AI assistants cite goes into page structure in more detail.

How do I make sure ChatGPT can find the page?

• Allow OpenAI's search crawler. OpenAI's crawler documentation names OAI-SearchBot as the crawler used for ChatGPT search. Check that your robots.txt and any firewall or bot-protection setting don't block it.
• Get the page indexed. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and link to the new page from the rest of your site.
• Serve the text in the HTML, not only after JavaScript runs.

The guide on schema markup and llms.txt covers the technical side, including which fixes the evidence says don't help.

What doesn't work?

• Calling yourself the best. Self-ranking "best X" list pages make up a much smaller share of ChatGPT's citations than of Google AI Mode's or Perplexity's: 3.6% against about 10% in Peec AI's data. And in a test of 100 "best software" questions on Google AI Overviews, the brand behind a cited self-promotional list was left out of the actual recommendation 69% of the time.
• Technical shortcuts. Adding schema markup or an llms.txt file has shown no clear effect on AI citations in the studies so far.
• Anyone promising a placement. Nobody can guarantee what an AI assistant will say.

How long does it take?

There's no reliable timetable, especially for a new website. On its own long-established blog, Semrush found that 34 of 81 new pages (42%) were being cited by ChatGPT search 30 days after publishing. We found no study that times this for a brand-new domain with no history, which is likely to take longer.

Results also move around from one run to the next. In a study by SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai (a company that sells AI tracking tools), the odds of ChatGPT, Claude or Google's AI returning the same list of brands twice were under 1 in 100. How often a brand appears across many runs is more meaningful than where it appears in any one list. One screenshot of one answer tells you very little either way.

Can a small business in the Philippines show up in ChatGPT answers?

Yes, and the same steps apply: nothing above depends on the size of the business or the country it's in. Being small isn't the obstacle; being vague is. A small supplier, clinic or studio with one clear page for each question its buyers ask can be named for those questions before larger competitors that only have a general home page.

How will I know if it's working?

Ask the same questions repeatedly over a period, not once, and watch how often your business is named. To see the visits and enquiries that arrive from ChatGPT, read our guide to tracking AI traffic in Google Analytics 4. If you'd like to know where you stand today, request an AI visibility audit.