Short answer. To get recommended by ChatGPT and other AIs, make your business easy to find and easy to trust. Get your pages indexed in the search engines the AIs read, let their crawlers in, describe the business identically everywhere, and earn mentions on other sites. No tactic is guaranteed, and no AI company publishes a ranking formula.
What you can and cannot control
You cannot buy or force a recommendation. You can remove the reasons an AI would skip you. Most small businesses are missing from AI answers for plain reasons: the page is not in the index the AI searches, a crawler is blocked, or the business is described three different ways on three different sites.
It also helps to know that an AI learns about a business in two ways:
- Memory (training). The model learned from a snapshot of the web up to a cut-off date. Anthropic, for example, lists a June 2026 knowledge cut-off for its current Claude models (Anthropic). Anything newer is not in memory, and memory only changes when a new model is trained.
- Live search. With search on, the AI looks up pages at the moment of the question. Google describes this for Gemini as grounding that connects the model to "real-time web content" (Google AI for Developers).
Almost everything below works on the live route, because that is the one you can change this month. Our guide on memory versus live search goes further.
Which index each AI searches
Your page has to be findable in the index behind each AI. The full evidence, with dates and gaps, is in which search engine each AI uses.
| AI | Live search draws on | How sure we are |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Several providers plus OpenAI's own crawler. OpenAI says it uses third-party search providers and has not said how much comes from Bing | Partly confirmed (OpenAI) |
| Gemini and Google AI features | Google Search's index | Confirmed (Google) |
| Perplexity | Its own index, built by PerplexityBot | Confirmed (Perplexity) |
| Claude | Brave Search, according to Anthropic's subprocessor list | Reported, not confirmed in Anthropic's documentation (TechCrunch) |
| Microsoft Copilot | Bing | Confirmed (Microsoft Learn) |
Because the indexes differ, the safe plan is to be indexed widely, not to chase one engine.
Seven steps, in order
- Check where you stand. Ask the four AIs the questions a customer would type, with search on, and write down who is named. Our step-by-step check takes under an hour. Without a baseline you cannot tell whether anything below worked.
- Get indexed in Google and Bing. Google says a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet" to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode (Google). Bing is the confirmed index for Copilot. Setting it up takes an afternoon: see how to get indexed in Bing.
- Let the search crawlers in. OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot is what surfaces sites in ChatGPT's search features, that blocked sites are left out of ChatGPT search answers, and that a robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to take effect (OpenAI). Perplexity says PerplexityBot surfaces and links sites in its results (Perplexity). Anthropic says blocking Claude-SearchBot stops indexing for search (Anthropic). Open your robots.txt and check none of these is blocked by a blanket rule. Training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot) are separate and you can decide on them independently.
- Put a plain, direct answer on the page. Write the page so a stranger could lift one paragraph and have a correct answer: what you do, where, for whom, and how to contact you. This is our editorial advice, not a documented ranking factor. Google says there are "no additional requirements" and no "special optimizations" for AI Overviews beyond being indexed and eligible (Google), so clear writing is about being quotable, not about a trick.
- Add accurate structured data. Markup labels your business name, address and pages for machines. Google says it is not required for its AI features. Microsoft's Bing has said it helps its models. Details in schema for AI search.
- Describe the business the same way everywhere. Use one name, one description and one web address on your site, Google Business Profile, directories and social profiles. See entity basics for AI.
- Earn mentions outside your own site. In an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, the number of branded web mentions had the strongest correlation with appearing in Google AI Overviews, at 0.664, ahead of backlinks at 0.218 (Ahrefs). Ahrefs itself notes that correlation is not causation. Reviews and forum discussion are the practical way to earn them: see reviews, Reddit and AI recommendations.
Keep pages fresh and honest
Bing's webmaster blog says freshness signals affect how quickly updates appear in search results and AI-generated answers, and that a sitemap's lastmod date "should reflect the true last modification time of the page content" (Bing Webmaster Blog). Update the page when prices, hours or services change, and only change the date when the content changed.
What we could not find evidence for
- llms.txt. We cover the evidence in does llms.txt work.
- IndexNow helping ChatGPT. No OpenAI statement links the two. IndexNow is documented for the engines that take part (Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep), not for ChatGPT (IndexNow).
- Percentage lifts from any single tactic. Many blogs quote them. We found no first-party source and do not repeat them.
Measure, then repeat
Answers change from one run to the next, so one good or bad answer proves little (why AI answers change). Re-run the same check monthly and compare the share of runs that name you. If you want that done every morning with live search on all four AIs, that is what aipozi does, at $29 a month per site.
Frequently asked questions
Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT? We found no OpenAI documentation offering paid placement inside ChatGPT's search answers. OpenAI does say its search uses third-party providers and content from partners (OpenAI), but that is not something a small business can buy.
How long does it take for a change to show up in AI answers? It depends on the route. OpenAI says a robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to take effect for search (OpenAI). Memory only changes when a new model is trained, which takes months. We found no published standard time for a new page to be cited.
Should I block AI crawlers to protect my content? If you want to appear in an AI's search answers, do not block its search crawler. Training crawlers such as GPTBot are separate, so you can treat them differently (OpenAI).
Do I need to make a separate page for each AI? No. One clear, indexed page is read by all of them, through different search indexes. The job is to get that page into several indexes, not to write several versions.
Does adding an llms.txt file get me recommended? We found no evidence that it does. See does llms.txt work.
Sources
Checked on 27 October 2026. Where a provider has not confirmed something, the guide says so. The table of which AI uses which index, with gaps, is on which search engine each AI uses.