How to Get ChatGPT to Recommend Your Business

To get ChatGPT to recommend your business, give it a website it can read and trust. That means pages that answer the questions your buyers ask in plain language, facts that match everywhere you show up online, structured data that labels who you are and what you do, and nothing blocking the crawler ChatGPT search uses.

Most people who ask me about this didn’t start with a strategy. They asked ChatGPT who does what they do in their market, and a competitor came back, or a directory, or nothing at all.

Buyers call this work “AI SEO.” Inside the industry it’s usually called AEO, answer engine optimization, and sometimes GEO. I use AEO below and keep the vocabulary lesson short, because what matters is what’s on your site.

Key takeaways

• Check your robots.txt file first. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
• Answer each buyer question in the first two sentences of the page that buyer would land on.
• Keep your name, services, and service area the same on your site, your Google Business Profile, your directory listings, and LinkedIn.
• Add schema that labels what the page already says.
• Treat llms.txt and agent-readiness as later steps. Neither one makes up for unclear pages.

Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor instead of me?

Usually because your competitor’s site gave it something to quote and yours didn’t.

When someone asks an AI assistant who to hire, it often searches the web, reads a handful of pages, and writes an answer from them. Your site is one of the pages it might read. If what it finds is a hero slider, a tagline, and “solutions for your business,” it has nothing to work with, so it quotes the firm that wrote down what they do, where, and for whom.

Size and age of the firm matter less here than people expect. A model can only recommend what it can read.

Is this AI SEO, AEO, or GEO?

All three names describe overlapping work. “AI SEO” is the phrase buyers type. AEO means structuring content so answer engines can pull a direct answer from it and credit you. GEO comes from a 2023 research paper that tested how content changes affect visibility in AI-generated answers. In those tests, adding citations, quotations, and statistics helped, and keyword stuffing didn’t (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024).

None of it replaces regular SEO. Google says the usual SEO basics apply to its AI Overviews and AI Mode, with no special file or schema required (Google Search Central). The longer version of how the two fit together is in Is AEO the new SEO?

How do I show up in ChatGPT search results?

Start by letting ChatGPT’s crawler in. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and it recommends allowing that crawler in your robots.txt file (OpenAI).

This is the boring check, and it comes first. If you don’t know how to look, ask whoever runs your site to open robots.txt with you and find the line for OAI-SearchBot. Then move on to the pages themselves.

What does ChatGPT need to find on my website?

It needs your facts in plain text, arranged so each page answers a question. In practice that comes down to a short list.

• Pages written as answers. The question your buyer asks, answered in the first two sentences of the page they’d land on. Headers that make a claim, where most sites have “Our Approach.”
• Facts in text. Services, service area, who you work with, and what you don’t do, written out on the page. A fact that lives only in an image or a PDF is hard for a model to use.
• The same facts everywhere. Your site, your Google Business Profile, your directory listings, and your LinkedIn page should agree. When they don’t, a model has to pick one, and it may pick the wrong one. We keep them in line by keeping one record of the company that everything reads from.
• Specifics over adjectives. “Trusted and experienced” appears on every competitor’s site and tells a model nothing. A mechanism it can repeat, like how fast you return estimates or which counties you cover, is something it can use.
• Structured data that matches the page. Schema markup labels what’s already visible: your organization, your services, your FAQ. Google asks that structured data match the visible text, so the page still has to say it first.
• Speed. The sites we build target under a second on a phone. A page that takes six seconds loses the visitor, and I wouldn’t bet on a crawler being more patient.

If you want to check your own site against that list, this is where I’d look.

Do backlinks matter for getting recommended?

We don’t build backlinks, and I wouldn’t start there.

AI engines do weigh what other people say about you: reviews, press coverage, directory listings, associations, the local business journal. We think of it in three tiers. AI mentions you, AI recommends you, and people talk about you. The first two depend mostly on your site. The third comes from coverage and citations in places the engines trust. A website can’t manufacture that alone, but it can stop wasting it, by saying the same thing your coverage says and making it easy to confirm.

Some of what gets sold as AEO right now is the same link packages and keyword reports SEO firms have always sold, with a new label on the invoice. If the proposal in front of you is mostly link counts, ask what changes on your actual pages.

Do I need llms.txt or an “agent-ready” website?

Neither is where I’d start, and both are worth knowing about.

llms.txt is a proposed standard: a plain Markdown file that summarizes your site for AI tools (llmstxt.org). Google’s guidance says you don’t need AI text files to appear in its AI features. We publish one on mktng.co because it costs little to maintain, and I’d never sell it to you as the thing that gets you recommended. More on that in Should I use llms.txt on my website?

“Agent-ready” goes a step further: can an AI agent discover your pages, read them in a clean format, and eventually do something there, like send a consult request? Cloudflare’s free check at isitagentready.com scores this, and I like it because nobody selling you a website wrote it (Cloudflare blog). It looks at four areas: whether agents can discover your pages, whether they can get your content as clean text, how your site sets rules for AI bots, and whether an agent can take an action on your site.

Run your own site through it before you pay anyone to fix anything, and expect a low score. When Cloudflare launched the check, it scanned a large set of heavily visited sites and found 3.9 percent passing its Markdown check. The checklist I’d work through first is in What makes an agent-ready website?

What does MKTNG build?

We build AEO Websites: sites made to be read, cited, and recommended by AI search. Every page is written as an answer, pages load in under a second on a phone, and the schema matches the page. An on-site AI answers visitor questions in your voice, from knowledge you’ve signed off on. The content lives in structured files that your team and your AI tools read from too, so when something about your company changes, you change it once.

Before any website engagement, we run an AI search baseline across the engines your customers use and put the results on page one of the proposal.

The Moraga Country Club community site we built has pulled 311 visitors since June: 126 from organic search, 42 from a postcard QR code into its home value estimator, and four who arrived from ChatGPT. Four is a small number. It’s also a real one.

If the question behind the question is how ready the whole company is for AI, the website is one piece of it. We cover the rest in an AI readiness assessment.

Try this before you hire anyone

Open the AI you use most and ask it who the best firms are for what you do in your market, in the words a buyer would use. Then ask it to describe your company. If the answer is wrong, vague, or about someone else, you’ve found your baseline. Every prospect who asks is getting the same answer.

When you want help with what comes next, Book a Working Session.

Questions we get

How can I get ChatGPT to recommend my business?

Make your website easy for it to read and trust. Answer the questions your buyers ask in plain language on the pages they’d land on, keep your facts consistent across your site and listings, add structured data that matches the page, and make sure your robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot, the crawler ChatGPT search uses.

How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT?

Check three places: your robots.txt file, so OAI-SearchBot can reach your site; your key pages, so each one answers a buyer question in its first two sentences; and your listings, so your name, services, and service area match everywhere ChatGPT might look.

How do I show up in ChatGPT search results?

Allow OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt file. OpenAI says sites that block it won’t appear in ChatGPT search answers. After that, the pages have to earn it: clear answers near the top, facts written in text, and schema that matches what’s visible.

ChatGPT is recommending my business. How did that happen?

Usually because it found clear, consistent information about you: a page that answers the question someone asked, listings that agree with it, and mentions in places it trusts. Ask ChatGPT to describe your company and check what it gets right and wrong. The wrong parts show you which pages to fix.

Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor instead of me?

Most often, the competitor’s website states what they do, where, and for whom in plain text a model can quote, and yours doesn’t. Compare the two homepages side by side and look for specifics: services, service area, and proof. Whichever page answers the buyer’s question faster is the one that gets cited.