On this page
- How ChatGPT business recommendations are actually assembled
- What you can change to get cited by ChatGPT
- Why ChatGPT SEO is mostly the search work you already pay for
- What does not work
- Does any of this help you rank in AI chatbots generally?
- How to get mentioned in ChatGPT, and how you would know it worked
- Sources
Most people asking how to rank in ChatGPT have already done the thing that prompted the question. They typed their own business in, got handed a competitor, and found that none of the levers they know about obviously apply.
It is a reasonable worry. Ofcom recorded 1.8 billion UK visits to ChatGPT in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million in the same period of 2024. The audience is real and it is growing quickly.
The short answer is that there is nothing to buy and nothing to submit. That makes it feel like a black box. It is closer to the search work that sits under everything else than the commentary admits, and it is what a generative engine optimisation agency is actually doing.
My SEO agency is trying to charge me extra for ai search they say it will get me seen in chat gpt. Is it worth it? I pay them 1200 and they want an extra 300 for ai visibility. I do get more through my website now but feel like it's not as much as it should be.
A UK business owner asking whether AI visibility is a real service, r/smallbusinessuk, March 2026
How ChatGPT business recommendations are actually assembled
An assistant answering a question about local suppliers does two separate things. First it retrieves: it searches, fetches a handful of pages, and reads them.
Then it generates. It writes one answer out of what it read, and it names the sources it is confident enough to attribute.
That second step is where ChatGPT business recommendations come from. The model is not consulting a directory of businesses it has been paid to know about. It is summarising pages, and a page that never quite says what the business does is a page that is difficult to summarise.
What you can change to get cited by ChatGPT
Three things are genuinely within your control. None of them is exotic, and the first one is a single line in a file most sites already have.
Let the right crawler in
OpenAI publishes four named user agents and they do different jobs. OAI-SearchBot is the one that surfaces sites in ChatGPT's search features. OpenAI states plainly that sites opted out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links.
GPTBot is the training crawler and is a separate decision. ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a person asks about it in the moment. OpenAI notes it is not used to decide whether content may appear in search.
One practical detail, before anybody panics about a slow result. OpenAI says it can take roughly 24 hours from a robots.txt change for its systems to adjust. Nothing here is instant.
| User agent | What it is for | What it decides for you |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | Surfacing sites in ChatGPT's search features | Whether you can appear in a search answer |
| GPTBot | Crawling content that may train the foundation models | Whether your writing trains the model |
| ChatGPT-User | Fetching a page because a user asked about it | Nothing about search; it is a live fetch |
| OAI-AdsBot | Checking landing pages submitted as ads | Nothing, unless you advertise in ChatGPT |
Taken from OpenAI's published crawler documentation, 11 September 2026. A robots.txt change takes roughly 24 hours to register.
Say who you are without ambiguity
A model corroborates. It is looking for the same business name, the same address and the same description of what you do, said consistently across the pages it can reach.
Sites that fail this usually fail it at the template level rather than in the copy. So it is a job for whoever looks after the site itself as much as for a writer.
Be named on pages the model already reads
Being mentioned on a trade body page, a local directory, a supplier list or a publication is what turns an assertion about your business into something corroborated.
This is unglamorous and it is slow, and it is the same work an SEO agency in London would be doing for you anyway.
Why ChatGPT SEO is mostly the search work you already pay for
Read the list above and very little of it is new. That is the honest position, and it is worth saying before anybody charges a separate line for it.
The Competition and Markets Authority put more than 90% of UK searches on Google when it gave the company strategic market status in search. The traditional channel has not gone anywhere, even as the way answers are presented changes.
What has changed is what an answer looks like when it arrives. SparkToro measured 68.01% of Google searches ending without a click in the first four months of 2026, which is the same pressure from a different direction.
From my understanding, SEO and AEO aren't too dissimilar. Both require good site structure, customer-centric pages, and trusted backlinks. If your agency is doing these things for your SEO then there's a good chance that they'll also be picked up for AI search. In short, I'd keep your investment where it is.
A reply in the same thread, on whether AI visibility is a separate purchase, r/smallbusinessuk, March 2026
What does not work
This section earns the article its keep, because the market is young enough that the myths have not been embarrassed out of it yet.
- There is no paid inclusion. You cannot buy a place in an answer, and the advertising products that exist in ChatGPT are advertising, labelled as such.
- There is no submission form and no meta tag. Nothing you can add to a page registers your business with a model.
- Nobody can promise you a mention. An answer is generated fresh each time and varies between users, so a promise of a fixed position is a promise about something that does not hold still.
- Stuffing a page with the assistant's name does nothing. A page about ChatGPT is not the same thing as a page a model finds useful.
Does any of this help you rank in AI chatbots generally?
Largely yes, and that is the one genuine efficiency here. The assistants differ in which crawler they send and which search index they lean on, but they are all reading web pages and all preferring the ones that answer early.
So work done to rank in AI chatbots is rarely wasted on the others. Where they differ is in the opt-out: each publishes its own user agent, and a robots.txt written for one does not cover the rest.
The tooling is younger than the marketing for it. It is worth knowing which of the AI SEO tools measure something and which repackage a rank tracker.
How to get mentioned in ChatGPT, and how you would know it worked
Two instruments exist and each one is half blind. Knowing how to get mentioned in ChatGPT matters less than being able to tell whether it happened.
The first is asking it yourself, on a fixed list of prompts, on a fixed schedule. It shows whether you are named and who is named instead, and it says nothing about how many people ask.
The second is referral traffic from the assistants that send it. That shows real arrivals and misses every answer a reader was satisfied by without clicking.
Neither belongs in a report on its own, which is a familiar problem: what reporting tools can and cannot show is the older version of the same argument.
We keep a prompt list per client and check it alongside the rankings. The work we have published says what that has and has not moved. To know what your own prompts return today, ask us and we will run them.