1. Make sure ChatGPT can reach you
OpenAI says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. It's a separate setting from GPTBot, the training crawler, so you can decline training and still allow search. Read your robots.txt and confirm each rule says what you intend. Our study of major websites shows how many sites block these bots.
2. Ask it what it says today
Write down the questions your buyers actually ask, then put them to ChatGPT with search on. Don't name your brand in the question. Note who gets recommended, what's said about them and which pages are linked. Repeat this a few times, because one answer proves little.
3. Say clearly what you do and for whom
A model can only repeat what it can find. Your home, pricing and product pages should state in plain words what you sell, who it suits, what it costs and how it differs. Put the answer in the first sentence under a heading that matches the question. Answer-ready passages covers how.
4. Get onto the sites it reads
In our sample of 174 ChatGPT answers to buyer questions, the sites cited most were g2.com, zoho.com, microsoft.com, zapier.com, capterra.com. Some of those are vendors, so look for the review sites and publishers among them. The brand named most in each of our categories appeared in 92% of answers across all the AI sources we measured, while its own site was cited in 27%, so what others write about you matters.
Look up your category on the AI recommendation leaderboards to see the sites cited there, then find out how to be listed on each one or included in its comparisons.
5. Correct what's wrong at the source
If an answer gets your price or features wrong, find the page it relied on. If that page is yours, update it. If it's someone else's, ask them to correct it. Our product fact audit gives you a way to work through this.
6. Measure it properly
Track how often you're named and how often you're cited, as two numbers, across a fixed set of questions on a regular schedule. Measuring AI visibility without false claims explains why a single screenshot can mislead you. To repeat those checks automatically, a ChatGPT visibility tracker keeps each answer and compares like with like.
What this can't promise
These steps improve your odds and remove the obstacles you can see. They don't guarantee a recommendation, and if customers and reviewers don't rate you, answers built from their words are unlikely to either. For the citation side specifically, see how to get cited by ChatGPT.
