How to get your brand recommended by ChatGPT: a practical guide

Short answer: you can't buy or request a place in ChatGPT's answers. What you can do is make your site readable to OpenAI's search crawler, describe what you sell in plain words, and get your brand named on the pages ChatGPT reads when it searches: review sites, "best of" lists, communities and the listings it pulls local and product data from. Then you measure the same questions every few weeks to see whether anything moved.

This is the overview guide for our series on ChatGPT recommendations. Everything about how ChatGPT works comes from OpenAI's own help center and developer docs, checked on 26 October 2026. Where we use third-party research, we say whose it is.

How ChatGPT decides which brands to name

ChatGPT can answer a question in two ways. It can answer from what the model already learned, or it can search the web first and build the answer from what it finds. OpenAI's help center says ChatGPT "may search the web automatically when your question would benefit from current information", and anyone can force a search from the tools menu.

When it searches, it doesn't send your exact words anywhere. OpenAI explains that ChatGPT search "typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries" for its search partners, then may run more specific follow-up searches after reading the first results. Its own example: "what are some good restaurants near me?" becomes "top restaurants San Francisco" when the user's IP address points to San Francisco. If memory is on, saved details can change the rewrite too (a vegan user gets "good vegan restaurants San Francisco").

Two practical consequences follow:

• The search runs on the rewritten query. A buyer types a long, chatty question. ChatGPT searches for something much closer to a classic search phrase. Pages that clearly match "best [category] for [use case]" have an advantage.
• Different users get different answers. Location and memory change the search behind the answer, so a single test from your own account tells you very little.

On ranking, OpenAI says only that ChatGPT "ranks search results using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information" and that "placement is not guaranteed". There is no published formula. Anyone selling a guaranteed ChatGPT ranking is guessing.

Step 1: Make sure ChatGPT is allowed to read your site

This is the one requirement OpenAI spells out. Its help center says that to make a website eligible for inclusion, you should allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl it and confirm that your host or CDN allows traffic from OpenAI's published search bot IP addresses.

OpenAI runs several bots, and they do different jobs:

So you can block training and still be searchable: disallow GPTBot, allow OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI notes it can take about 24 hours for a robots.txt change to take effect in search.

The robots.txt file is the easy part. The common failure is a firewall or "bot protection" setting at the CDN that quietly blocks OpenAI's IP ranges. OpenAI publishes them at openai.com/searchbot.json, so your developer or hosting provider can allow them explicitly.

One more check: in its section on search partners, OpenAI's help center points readers to Microsoft's and Shopify's privacy policies for how those providers handle queries, which tells you Microsoft is among them. Being indexed in Bing is cheap insurance. Bing Webmaster Tools shows whether your key pages are in its index.

Step 2: Say plainly what you are, who it's for and what it costs

Once ChatGPT can read your pages, they need to answer the questions behind a recommendation. When it searches "best invoicing software for freelancers", it needs pages that say, in text, that you are invoicing software and that you're built for freelancers.

Most company sites are vaguer than their owners think. Check that these exist and are written in plain language:

• A homepage line that names your category and your customer. "The invoicing app for freelancers in the UK and EU" beats "Get paid, beautifully".
• A pricing page with real numbers. Buyers ask ChatGPT what things cost. If your price is hidden, the answer will quote someone who shows theirs, or an out-of-date review.
• Use-case or industry pages that match how people describe their situation: "for agencies", "for restaurants", "for teams under 10".
• Honest comparison and alternatives pages. "[Competitor] alternatives" and "[you] vs [competitor]" are exactly the searches ChatGPT runs for comparison prompts. Say who each option suits, including when it isn't you.
• An FAQ written in your customers' words, not your product team's.

Keep the facts identical everywhere: name, category, prices, locations. If your site says one thing and a directory says another, you are leaving the answer to chance.

Step 3: Get named on the pages ChatGPT reads

Your own site is one source among many. For "best X" questions, the pages that shape the answer are usually other people's: review platforms, comparison articles, community threads and trade press.

The best large dataset on this comes from Ahrefs. In a study of 75,000 brands, the number of brand web mentions had the strongest correlation with how often a brand appeared in Google's AI Overviews (0.664), far ahead of backlinks (0.218). Ahrefs is clear that this is correlation, not proof, and the study measured AI Overviews rather than ChatGPT. Still, it points the same way as everything else: being talked about widely matters more than one more link.

The most useful version of this work starts with evidence from your own market:

1. Ask ChatGPT, with search on, the 10 to 20 questions your buyers ask.
2. Open Sources under each answer and list the domains it cites.
3. Sort them by how often they come up. That list is your to-do list.
4. For each source, find the honest way in: claim and complete a review profile, ask happy customers for reviews, pitch a genuinely useful data point to the publication, or answer questions in the community as yourself.

Our guide on mentions, citations and recommendations explains why being cited and being recommended are different results, and why the cited sources are where to look first.

What not to do: fake reviews, paid placements dressed up as editorial, or mass-posted comments. They break the rules of the platforms you need, and Google's spam policies treat paid links that pass ranking credit as link spam. They also put your name next to content people stop trusting.

Step 4: Local businesses, look after your listings and reviews

For "near me" questions, ChatGPT uses your approximate location, and OpenAI says it may share that general location with third-party providers for things like nearby business listings. For restaurants, it can show reservation times from OpenTable, Resy or Yelp.

Yelp is worth singling out. Yelp says its content integration surfaces its reviews, ratings, photos and business details directly in ChatGPT (Yelp blog, 10 August 2026), and Axios reported on 23 July 2026 that Yelp is licensing that data to OpenAI. If you run a local business in the US or Canada, an incomplete or neglected Yelp page is now a ChatGPT problem too.

The basics are the same as for local search: one consistent name, address and phone number, the right categories, current opening hours, photos, and a steady flow of genuine reviews that mention what you actually do.

Step 5: Online shops, get your product data in

Product recommendations work differently. OpenAI's shopping help page says product results draw on structured metadata such as price and description from first-party and third-party providers. When a shopper picks a product, merchants are ranked on "availability, price, quality, and whether they are the maker or primary seller."

According to OpenAI's merchant page (checked 26 October 2026):

• Shopify and Etsy catalogs are already integrated. No setup or application is needed.
• Other merchants can apply to share a product feed and join a waitlist. A self-serve merchant platform is planned.
• Shopping is currently live for ChatGPT users in the US.
• There are no fees on purchases that start in ChatGPT, and checkout happens on your own site or app.

If you sell outside Shopify or Etsy and have US customers, applying costs nothing. Either way, product titles, descriptions, prices and stock levels that are complete and up to date help in every channel, ChatGPT included.

Where ChatGPT ads fit

ChatGPT now shows ads to some users on the Free and Go plans. They can bring you visitors, but they don't buy a recommendation. OpenAI's ads help page is direct about this: "Ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers," advertisers "have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT's responses," and ads appear separately below the response, clearly labeled. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts don't see ads at all.

Treat ads as a separate channel with its own budget. The organic answer is earned through the steps above.

How to measure whether it's working

Recommendations change between runs, users and weeks, so judge progress on a fixed set of questions asked on a schedule, not on one screenshot.

• Start by hand. Our step-by-step guide on how to check if ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews mention your brand takes about an hour and costs nothing.
• Get a quick baseline. Our free AI visibility snapshot checks whether AI answers mention your brand and emails you the result.
• Repeat it for free. geoSurge has a free desktop app with unlimited prompts that runs on a ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini subscription you already pay for (checked on geosurge.ai/pricing, 26 October 2026). More options are on our free AI visibility tools page.
• Pay when you need trends and competitors. Rankscale Essentials starts at $20/mo, sold yearly only ($17/mo with the yearly discount), checked on its pricing page on 26 October 2026. See our Rankscale review, the Otterly.AI vs Rankscale comparison and the full pricing table, which covers all 30 tools we list.

Track three things per question: whether you're named, where you appear in the list, and which sources were cited. Check again after four to six weeks of work. Moving from absent to listed on a few category questions is a realistic first goal.

Our recommendation

1. Fix access first. Allow OAI-SearchBot, check your CDN against OpenAI's IP list and confirm your key pages are in Bing. It takes an hour and rules out the silent failure.
2. Rewrite the pages that answer buying questions. Category, pricing, use-case and comparison pages, in plain words, with the same facts everywhere.
3. Spend most of your effort on other people's pages. Find the sources ChatGPT cites for your category and earn an honest place on them.
4. Use the channel that fits your business. Local businesses should fix listings and reviews. Shops should get their product data in.
5. Measure the same questions every month. One answer is an anecdote. Twelve weeks of the same questions is a trend.

None of this guarantees a mention, and OpenAI says as much. But every step also helps buyers who never open ChatGPT, which makes it a safe place to spend time.