How to get recommended by ChatGPT

ChatGPT is the most-used AI assistant in the world — and it recommends businesses from a blend of trained knowledge and live search results. Nearly half of U.S. consumers used AI chatbots for shopping in 2025, and most of them reached for ChatGPT first.

How ChatGPT discovers businesses

• Training knowledge gathered by OpenAI's GPTBot crawler from across the web.
• ChatGPT search, which retrieves live results — drawing on its own index (built by OAI-SearchBot) and third-party search data — and cites the pages it uses.
• User-triggered browsing via ChatGPT-User, which fetches pages when a user asks about them directly.

Optimizing for ChatGPT: the checklist

1. Allow OpenAI's crawlers. Permit GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, and ChatGPT-User in robots.txt.
2. Stay indexed in Bing. ChatGPT's search stack has historically drawn on Bing-derived results — verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and keep it healthy there.
3. Win the retrieval, then the citation. Rank-worthy pages get retrieved; GEO-optimized pages get cited. You need both.
4. Be present where ChatGPT corroborates. Reviews, directories, industry lists, and community discussions (Reddit prominently among them) heavily influence which businesses ChatGPT names.
5. Mark up your entity. Consistent NAP data and Organization/Service/FAQ schema help ChatGPT state facts about you accurately.

Measuring your ChatGPT visibility

Test your customers' real questions in ChatGPT with and without search enabled, and log mentions, position, and accuracy. Our AI Visibility Audit covers this across every major platform with a prioritized fix list.

Other platforms

How recommendation works on each major AI platform: ChatGPT · Claude · Perplexity · Gemini · Google AI Overviews