How to get your business on ChatGPT, and recommended by it.
You cannot submit a business to ChatGPT. There is no listing form, no ads and no directory. ChatGPT recommends businesses it finds in its training data, in live web search results, and on the sites it trusts. Getting recommended means being findable, clearly described and mentioned in the right places. Here is how, step by step.
Last updated 3 September 2026 · By the Pemba team
How does ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?
ChatGPT builds a recommendation from three inputs. First, its training data: what the model already knows about your business from the web as of its last training run. Second, live search: for current or local questions, ChatGPT searches the web (via Bing and its own crawler) and reads the top results before answering. Third, trust signals: reviews, mentions on sites it already relies on, and structured data that confirms what your business is.
The practical consequence is that a business with a clear website, consistent listings, recent reviews and a few third-party mentions gets recommended. A business with a beautiful website and nothing else usually does not.
How do I get my business listed on ChatGPT?
- 1.Make sure ChatGPT can read your site. Check robots.txt allows
GPTBotandOAI-SearchBot. Many security plugins block them by default. If they are blocked, nothing else on this list will work. - 2.State plainly what you are, where you are and who you serve. On the home page and About page, in the first hundred words: business name, service, city or service area, and the type of customer. Models cannot recommend a business they cannot categorise.
- 3.Add Organization or LocalBusiness schema. Name, address, phone, URL, logo, opening hours, service area, and
sameAslinks to your Google Business Profile and social accounts. This is the machine-readable version of step 2. - 4.Answer the questions people actually ask. Add pages or FAQ sections with headings phrased as questions ("How much does a bookkeeper cost for a tradie?") and a direct 40 to 60 word answer immediately below each. ChatGPT lifts these paragraphs almost verbatim.
- 5.Publish /llms.txt. A plain-text file at your site root summarising the business, services, pricing and FAQs. It is a direct feed for AI crawlers.
- 6.Get consistent everywhere else. Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp and the industry directories in your niche should all show the same name, address and phone. Inconsistency reads as two different businesses.
- 7.Collect and respond to reviews. Recent Google reviews are one of the strongest signals for local recommendations, and ChatGPT reads them.
- 8.Get mentioned where ChatGPT already looks. A YouTube video, a Reddit answer in the relevant subreddit, a listicle on an industry site, a local news mention. In our sampling of AI answers, YouTube and Reddit were cited more than every software vendor combined.
How do I get ChatGPT to promote my business?
ChatGPT does not promote. It recommends what it can verify and what it has seen recommended elsewhere. Steps 6 to 8 above are the "promotion" layer: the more credible places that describe your business the same way, the more confidently the model names you. Paying for ads on Google or Meta does not change what ChatGPT says, and there is currently no paid placement inside ChatGPT answers for small businesses.
How do I check if my business shows up in ChatGPT?
Ask it the way a customer would, in a fresh chat, with web search on: "best [service] in [city]", "who should I use for [problem]", "[your business] reviews". Repeat each question three to five times, because answers vary run to run. One mention in five runs is noise; four in five is a result.
Pemba does this for you on a schedule. Each month it samples your tracked questions against ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI, records who was named, and reports the citation rate with the month-on-month change. The free AI visibility check covers the on-page side in about 15 seconds: whether your site has the schema, structure and signals in steps 1 to 5.
How long does it take to show up in ChatGPT?
For questions ChatGPT answers with live web search, changes to your site and listings can appear within weeks. For answers drawn from training data, it depends on the next model update, which has historically been every few months. Google AI Overviews are faster than either, usually four to eight weeks. Plan for a quarter, keep the changes in place, and measure monthly.
What stops a business from appearing in ChatGPT?
- ✓GPTBot or OAI-SearchBot blocked in robots.txt or by a firewall.
- ✓No clear statement of what the business does and where, in plain text.
- ✓Service pages written as slogans rather than answers.
- ✓No schema, or schema with a different name or address from Google Business Profile.
- ✓Zero mentions anywhere except your own site.
- ✓Content last updated years ago, with no dates on the page.