AI and GEO
How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?
Short answer
ChatGPT and other AI services mention businesses they recognise as reliable, relevant sources. You improve your chances by giving AI crawlers access to your site, creating a factual page per service that opens with a short, direct answer, keeping your business details consistent everywhere and being mentioned on other trusted websites. A mention cannot be guaranteed or bought.
Where ChatGPT gets its answers
From what the model learned during training and, for current questions, from a live web search. In the second case, the service picks a number of sources and summarises them. So you want to be findable on the web and be a usable source.
1. Allow AI crawlers
Check that your robots.txt does not block crawlers such as GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google, unless that is a deliberate choice. Some hosts and security services block them by default.
2. Make your pages readable without JavaScript
Not every crawler runs JavaScript. If your text only appears after scripts load, a crawler may see an empty page.
3. Start every page with the answer
A short answer in the first paragraph that makes sense on its own is easy to quote. Then the explanation, the conditions and the follow-up questions.
4. Be factual and specific
What do you do, for whom, in which region, since when, on what terms? Vague marketing language is hard to use as a source; concrete, verifiable information is not.
5. Keep your business details consistent
Name, address, services and contact details the same on your site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories. Structured data (schema.org) helps systems recognise them.
6. Get mentioned on other sources
Reviews, trade media, directories, partner pages and comparison articles. AI services combine multiple sources; a business that only appears on its own site is mentioned less often.
Frequently asked questions
Can I pay to appear in ChatGPT?
Not to be mentioned in regular answers. Where AI services show ads, they are labelled as ads and separate from the answer.
How do I know whether ChatGPT mentions my business?
Ask a fixed set of questions your customers would ask and record the answers periodically. Also check Analytics for traffic from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai.
Does an llms.txt file help?
It is a proposal for a machine-readable summary of your site, not an official standard. It does no harm, but it does not replace good pages.
More questions about ai and geo
- What is the difference between SEO and GEO?SEO targets a place in Google's search results; GEO (generative engine optimisation) targets being mentioned or cited in the answers of AI services such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews.
- What is SEO?SEO stands for search engine optimisation.
- How do I rank higher on Google?You rank higher on Google by creating a page per service that answers the search query better than the pages currently at the top, by getting the technical basics right and by being visibly trustworthy, with a complete Google Business Profile and links from relevant websites.
- Why is my website not showing up on Google?It is usually one of six causes: the site has not been indexed yet, a setting blocks Google (such as 'noindex' or robots.txt), there is no dedicated page for what you want to be found for, the content is too thin, the domain is still young, or you are searching for a term with much stronger competitors.
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