How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT
To get recommended by ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, make sure their search crawlers and user agents can fetch your pages, say plainly what you are and who it's for in the first sentence of your key pages, publish the facts assistants quote (prices, features, locations, policies) as dated text in the HTML, and mark them up with structured data. This is often called answer engine optimization (AEO) or generative engine optimization (GEO).
From our data: In our 1,846-company benchmark (11 Oct 2026), 11% of sites blocked AI agents with a bot wall, so assistants couldn't read them when someone asked. As of 3 Nov 2026, 13 of the 214 vendors in our software rankings also disallow at least one AI bot in robots.txt.
What assistants need from you
Access
Allow OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot to index you, and ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User to fetch pages for a person. Check your CDN's bot rules, not just robots.txt.
A quotable first sentence
Start key pages with a definition: "Example Co is a [category] for [who] that [does what]." Assistants lift that sentence.
Facts in plain text, with dates
Put prices, plans, opening hours, shipping and returns in the HTML with an "as of" date. Facts that only exist in images, PDFs or scripts are invisible to most agents.
Organization or LocalBusiness data
Add Organization (or LocalBusiness, with address and opening hours) JSON-LD with your name, logo, URL and contact.
An About page agents can find
Link an About page from the homepage that says plainly what you do, who it's for and where you operate.
Contact details in text
Put an email, phone or contact page link in the HTML (not only a form or an image), so an agent can tell a user how to reach you.
An FAQ with real customer questions
Add an FAQ answering what customers actually ask, marked up with FAQPage JSON-LD.
Profiles linked with sameAs
List your LinkedIn, X, G2, Crunchbase or Google Business profile in the Organization JSON-LD sameAs field.
Answer the comparison questions
People ask assistants "X vs Y" and "best X for Y". A fair, dated comparison page on your site gives them something to cite.
Check it yourself
Shows the start of your JSON-LD. You want an Organization (or LocalBusiness) block with name, url, logo and sameAs. Then run the free check with the "Be recommended" job for the full list.
curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -o '<script type="application/ld+json">[^<]*' | head -c 600
Questions
What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
Making your site easy for AI assistants to find, read and quote, so you show up in their answers. It builds on SEO and adds crawler access for AI bots, answer-first copy and machine-readable facts.
Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?
There's no way to buy placement in ChatGPT's organic answers. What you control is whether assistants can read your site and whether it states the facts they need.
How do I know if ChatGPT recommends my business?
Ask it the questions your customers ask, in a fresh chat, and see who it names and cites. Repeat monthly; answers change as indexes update.