How to Get My Business Mentioned in ChatGPT: What We Know

You can't pay to get your business mentioned in ChatGPT, and nobody can promise that it will be. OpenAI documents only part of how this works. ChatGPT searches the web when it answers. It can only show your site in those answers if you let its search crawler in. It also relies on what other sites say about you: listings, reviews and articles.

This guide answers one question: how to get my business mentioned in ChatGPT. It puts the jobs in order, and you can do each one yourself for free. It also separates what OpenAI says from what agencies and tool vendors believe. If you want the same method for Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI answers, read our main guide on how to get your business cited by AI search.

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How ChatGPT finds businesses to mention

Say a customer asks ChatGPT for "a good emergency plumber in Leeds". The answer can come from two places.

What the model already knows. This comes from training and is often months out of date. You can't edit it.
A live web search. OpenAI's help page says ChatGPT search uses third-party search providers and content from its partners. It often rewrites the customer's question into shorter searches and sends them to those providers. Microsoft Bing has been reported as one of them.

You can influence the second route. ChatGPT reads search results, pages and listings, then picks names that several sources seem to agree on. That is our reading of how it behaves. OpenAI has not published a ranking formula.

Being recommended is also not the same as getting a link. Position Digital ran 278 buyer questions through ChatGPT across six B2B software categories. It found that 66% of brand recommendations happened without ChatGPT citing the brand's own website. The study covers software brands, not local businesses, and it isn't OpenAI data. It still points to something useful: third-party pages can do a lot of the work for you.

Can you pay to be mentioned in ChatGPT?

No. OpenAI offers no paid way into normal ChatGPT answers, and no form gets you listed. Thrive Agency says the same in its own guide. If someone sells you a "guaranteed ChatGPT placement", ask what exactly they control. The honest answer is: nothing directly.

The good news is that the work is free. Most of it means fixing your own listings and pages.

Step 1: The 10-question test (free, 30 minutes)

Measure before you change anything. Without a starting point, you won't know whether your fixes did anything.

Write down 10 questions a real customer would ask. Use their words, not yours. "Who fixes boilers on a Sunday near Didsbury?" works better than "boiler repair services".
Ask each one in ChatGPT. Use a fresh chat each time, or a logged-out window, so your own history doesn't change the answer.
Copy this table into a spreadsheet and fill it in.

Question	Date	Am I named?	Who is named instead	Sources ChatGPT shows	Anything wrong about me?
Emergency plumber open Sunday in Didsbury		Yes / No
Best family dentist near Clapham for kids
Where to eat ramen late in Austin

The "Sources ChatGPT shows" column matters most. When ChatGPT searches, it shows the pages it used. Those pages are your to-do list. If a local "best plumbers" article keeps showing up and you're not in it, you know where to start.

Run the test again on the same day each month. Answers change from one run to the next, so judge on all 10 questions, not just one.

Then check the page those questions should land on. Run a full audit on your main service page with the free Claude connector. You'll get a list of what's missing on that page before you start Step 5, and all it takes is a free account.

Step 2: Check that ChatGPT is allowed to read your site

This takes five minutes, and it's the one part where OpenAI gives clear rules.

OpenAI runs separate crawlers, and you can allow or block each one:

Crawler	What OpenAI says it does	What a local business should do
OAI-SearchBot	Used "to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features"	Allow it. If you block it, your site can't show up in ChatGPT search answers.
GPTBot	Collects content that may be used to train OpenAI's models	Your choice. Blocking it does not block OAI-SearchBot.
ChatGPT-User	Visits a page when a user asks ChatGPT to	OpenAI says robots.txt rules "may not apply", because a person started the visit

How to check:

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in your browser.
Look for OAI-SearchBot. If you see Disallow: / under it, your site is blocked from ChatGPT search.
Look for User-agent: * followed by Disallow: /. That line blocks every crawler, Google included. It sometimes gets left behind after a site rebuild.
Check whether your website builder or security plugin has an "AI crawlers" or "block AI bots" setting. Some web hosts and firewall services offer one. Turning it on can block search crawlers as well as training crawlers.

To allow ChatGPT search and block training, add this to robots.txt:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

If you're happy for both to read your site, leave out the GPTBot lines. OpenAI says a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to reach its systems.

Also check that search engines can see your site at all. If it isn't on Google or Bing, it's very unlikely to show up in an assistant's search either. Our guide on why you can't find your website on Google walks through the checks.

Step 3: Make your listings match everywhere

ChatGPT gets local facts from listings, so every listing needs to show the same facts. Do these jobs in this order:

Google Business Profile. Fill in everything: main category, services, hours, service area, photos and a description. Our Google Business Profile checklist goes through it field by field.
Bing Places for Business. It's easy to forget. ChatGPT's searches go through outside providers, so an empty Bing listing is a gap you can close for free at bingplaces.com. You can import your Google profile.
Apple Business Connect and the main directories in your trade.
Name, address and phone number. Write them exactly the same way on all of them. If one listing says "Smith & Sons Plumbing Ltd" and another says "Smith Plumbing", a machine may read them as two businesses.
Duplicates. Search your business name and phone number. Ask each platform to remove old and duplicate listings. Don't just leave them there.

This takes more than a weekend, and that's normal. Listings, reviews and pages take time to line up. Our free email, sent the day new guides come out, gives you the next step, in order, in plain English. Get it free.

Step 4: Reviews that say something

Insites studied 10,000 US local businesses. Those that both ChatGPT and Perplexity surfaced had an average of 133.4 Google reviews, against 10.7 for businesses that neither surfaced. Insites calls this a correlation, not proof that more reviews cause recommendations. It also comes from a company that sells audits, not from OpenAI.

What you can control:

Ask every happy customer for a review the day you finish the job, with a direct link. Our guide on how many Google reviews you need explains how to set a sensible target.
Reply to every review, including the bad ones. Keep replies short and specific.
Let customers use their own words. A review that says "came out at 10pm to fix a burst pipe in our flat" tells a machine more than "great service". You can't write reviews for customers, but you can ask them to mention what you did and where.

Step 5: Pages that answer the questions customers ask

When ChatGPT searches, it needs a page that answers the question plainly. A thin page gives it nothing to use.

One page per main service, with a plain opening line that says what you do, where, and for whom.
The areas you cover, written as real places, with what's different about working there (parking, older housing, travel charges). Never copy a page and swap the town name.
Prices or price ranges if you can give them, plus what changes the price.
A short FAQ built from your customers' real questions, the ones from your 10-question test.
Facts written as text, not hidden in images: opening hours, phone number, qualifications, insurance.

What format helps ChatGPT use your page?

OpenAI hasn't published a required format. Here's what's easy for any machine to read, and for a person too: a heading that matches the question, the answer in the first sentence under it, short lists, and simple tables for prices or hours. Schema markup (code that labels your business details) helps search engines read your page, so add LocalBusiness schema if your website builder offers it. Nobody has shown that it gets you mentioned in ChatGPT. Treat it as tidying up, not as a lever. The same goes for llms.txt, which we cover separately.

Step 6: Get named on the sites ChatGPT reads

This part takes the longest, and your test table shows you where to start. Each trade has different sources. Here's where to look:

Business	Third-party sources to check
Plumber, roofer, electrician	Trade body member directories, Checkatrade or TrustATrader (UK), Angi or HomeAdvisor (US), local "best plumbers in…" articles
Dentist, physio, lawyer, accountant	Professional body "find a practitioner" directories, Healthgrades or Zocdoc (US), NHS listings (UK), local law society or accounting body directories
Restaurant, café	Tripadvisor, Yelp, OpenTable or other booking sites, local food guides and press, "best of" lists in city magazines
Salon, gym, local shop	Booking platform profiles, local news, community Facebook groups, neighbourhood guides
Small SaaS	Software review sites, comparison articles, relevant Reddit threads where you can honestly help

Rules for every row:

Fix any listing that's wrong before you look for new ones.
Contact the writer of a local "best of" list once, politely, with one concrete reason to take a look at you. Don't pay for a spot on a list that claims to be independent.
On Reddit and forums, answer questions in your field as yourself. Spam usually gets removed and makes your brand look bad.

Does it matter if people use ChatGPT free or GPT-4?

You don't need to pay for anything. OpenAI's help page says ChatGPT search is available on the Free plan and on the paid plans, and some features work even when logged out. So the steps above cover what both free and paid users see.

Answers can differ from one model to the next (GPT-4o, newer versions, and models chosen automatically). They also depend on the user's location and on whether ChatGPT decides to search at all. That's why the 10-question test uses several questions and a monthly repeat. If you can, run it on both a free and a paid account, and record both results.

How long does it take?

Nobody knows for sure. Apart from the 24 hours it gives for robots.txt changes, OpenAI publishes no timeline. Thrive Agency suggests 3 to 6 months, but OpenAI gives no timeline. Fixing your robots.txt and listings is quick. Reviews and third-party mentions build up over months. For the bigger picture on SEO timelines, see how long SEO takes.

Common mistakes

Blocking every AI crawler in a firewall setting without checking what it actually blocks.
Two Google Business Profiles for the same address after a move.
Different business names on the website, the van and the listings.
Service pages with one line of text and a contact form.
Paying for "AI visibility packages" when the seller can't explain what they will change.

FAQ

Can I get my business mentioned in ChatGPT for free? Yes. Allowing OAI-SearchBot, completing your listings, asking for reviews and improving your service pages cost nothing but time. Normal answers have no paid placement.

Does ChatGPT use Google reviews? OpenAI doesn't say which review sources it uses. It searches through third-party providers, and review sites and business listings often appear among its sources. So keep your reviews strong on Google, Bing and trade directories.

How can I check if ChatGPT mentions my business? Ask it 10 real customer questions in fresh chats. Note who it names and which sources it shows, and repeat the test every month. Searching for your business name alone isn't enough, because customers don't search that way.

Should I block GPTBot? That's up to you. GPTBot is for training. OAI-SearchBot is for search answers. You can block the first and allow the second, because OpenAI treats them separately.

What to do today

Write 10 real customer questions and run the test. Save the table.
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and check that OAI-SearchBot isn't blocked.
Claim or update your Bing Places listing, and check that your name, address and phone number match Google exactly.
Send a review request to the last three customers you served.
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