Short answer: ChatGPT recommends businesses based on what it can find and trust about them: your own pages (via ChatGPT search), reviews, comparison articles, directories, forums and news. To be recommended, make your site easy for ChatGPT's crawlers to read and cite, keep your brand facts consistent everywhere, and earn mentions on the third-party pages it relies on in your category.
1. Find out what ChatGPT says today
Write down 20 to 50 questions your buyers would actually ask: “best dental clinic in Brisbane”, “PPC expert for Shopify stores UK”, “alternatives to [competitor]”. Ask them in ChatGPT, with search on and off, and note who gets named and which sources are cited.
2. Make your site citable
- Allow OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot in robots.txt if you want to be found and cited.
- Put a clear, factual summary at the top of key pages: who you are, what you do, where, and for whom.
- Add schema markup and an FAQ section with direct answers.
- Publish specific facts: prices, results, locations and credentials that a model can quote.
3. Fix your brand facts across the web
Inconsistent names, services or locations confuse models. Align your LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, directories and social bios with your website.
4. Earn mentions where ChatGPT looks
Look at the sources ChatGPT cited in step 1. Those are your targets: industry “best of” lists, review platforms, Reddit and community threads, partner pages and local press. Genuine reviews and expert commentary go a long way.
5. Track it monthly
Re-run the same prompt set every month and record whether you're mentioned, cited or recommended, and in what position. That's your ChatGPT share of voice.
I run this as a service. See ChatGPT marketing, and the same work sits inside wider GEO programmes.
FAQ
Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?
Organic recommendations can't be bought. Where ad formats exist they're labelled separately; being recommended in the answer itself comes from your web presence.
How often should I check ChatGPT visibility?
Monthly, on a fixed set of prompts, so you can see trends rather than one-off variation.