How AI assistants decide which businesses to name.
To increase the chances of your business being recommended by ChatGPT, make sure your website clearly explains who you serve, what you offer and where you operate, that your site can be crawled by OAI-SearchBot, and that your business information is consistent across your website and other reputable sources online. In practice that means: don't block OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, put plain sentences like 'We are a brand photographer serving Boise, Idaho' in real text on the page, give every service its own page, answer customer questions in writing, and keep your name, address, phone and services identical on your site, your Google Business Profile and any directory you appear in. OpenAI says allowing OAI-SearchBot makes a public site eligible to appear in ChatGPT search results, though placement is never guaranteed.
Read the full guide: How to get your business to show up in ChatGPT recommendations
Be crawlable, be clear, and be corroborated. Allow OAI-SearchBot, state your service and location in ordinary sentences rather than only in images or sliders, and make sure other trustworthy sites — your Google Business Profile, directories, press, partners — say the same thing about you.
The most common reasons are that your site blocks AI crawlers, your key information lives inside images or scripts instead of text, your pages never name your location or specialty plainly, or nothing else online confirms you exist. Fix those in that order.
Only if your site is public and doesn't block OAI-SearchBot, and only if the pages contain readable text. Check yourdomain.com/robots.txt for a rule disallowing OAI-SearchBot, and view your page with images off to see what's actually written.
Read the full guide: Does ChatGPT know about your business? Here's how to find out
It draws on sources it can access and that appear relevant and consistent for the question asked — pages it can crawl, plus what other reputable sites say. There is no ranking you can buy or submit to; clarity, consistency and corroboration are what you control.
Use one clear H1 per page, short factual sentences, a services list in text, an about page that names your location and who you serve, and an FAQ with the literal questions customers ask. Avoid burying facts in images, PDFs or animations.
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for any line blocking OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot or all user agents. Also confirm your pages return real HTML text. Bloom's free check reads your robots.txt and tells you in one line whether AI crawlers are allowed.
No. There's no tag that gets you into ChatGPT. Structured data can help machines understand your business, but readable text, an unblocked robots.txt and consistent information elsewhere matter far more.
Yes — small, specific businesses often do better than big vague ones, because AI answers tend to favour pages that match a narrow question exactly. 'Newborn photographer in Meridian, Idaho' is easier to match than 'creative studio'.
Publish self-contained answers: a page that answers one question completely, in plain language, with facts, numbers and specifics. Pages that hedge or ramble rarely get quoted.
It helps when each post answers a real question your customers ask and is written to be understood on its own. A post that says something specific and useful can be cited; a generic listicle usually can't.
Indirectly, yes. Reviews strengthen your Google Business Profile and give other sites something to say about you, which is exactly the outside corroboration AI answers lean on.
Not directly. ChatGPT search uses its own crawling and retrieval, but the work that makes you rank well — clear pages, real content, consistent details, outside mentions — is the same work that makes you easy for AI to find.
Days to weeks, depending on when your pages are next crawled. Treat it like search: make the change, keep it live, and re-check in a few weeks rather than the next morning.
