How do I get my website recommended by ChatGPT?
All guidesUpdated 7 steps
TL;DR
Make your site easy for ChatGPT to reach, read and quote. Let OpenAI's crawlers in through robots.txt, answer each buyer question in the first lines of a page, use one product name everywhere, and get listed accurately on the third-party sites its answers draw on. Then check a fixed set of buyer questions over time. Nobody can guarantee a recommendation.
ChatGPT answers in two ways. Sometimes it answers from what the model learned in training, which has a cutoff date and changes only when OpenAI ships a new model. Sometimes it searches the web, reads a few pages and names its sources. You can influence the second route far more directly than the first.
OpenAI has not published how ChatGPT picks which sites to name. What is known is the plumbing: which crawlers it uses, that it can only read pages it can fetch, and that ChatGPT search uses third-party search providers alongside OpenAI's own crawler. This guide works on that plumbing.
Step by step
- Step 1
Let OpenAI's crawlers reach your pages
Open your robots.txt and look for groups that name OAI-SearchBot, which OpenAI uses to surface sites in ChatGPT search, and ChatGPT-User, which fetches a page when someone asks ChatGPT to. If either is blocked by name or by a User-agent: * rule, add an explicit group with Allow: / for it. GPTBot is the training crawler, and allowing it is a separate choice.
- Step 2
Check your firewall and CDN, not only robots.txt
Some hosting and CDN providers offer settings that block AI crawlers before robots.txt is ever read. Check your bot and firewall settings, then look in your server logs for requests from OAI-SearchBot. A page that answers the crawler with an error or a challenge is a page ChatGPT search cannot read.
- Step 3
Get indexed by more than one search engine
Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console and in Bing Webmaster Tools. OpenAI has said ChatGPT search draws on third-party search providers as well as its own crawler, but not how much weight each one carries. Being findable in more than one index costs little.
- Step 4
Answer buyer questions in the first lines
List the questions a buyer asks before choosing a product like yours: which tool suits a job, how two options compare, what something costs. Make sure one page answers each of them in its first two or three sentences, under a heading in the buyer's words. A page that buries its answer under a pitch can be found and still not be quoted.
- Step 5
Use one name and one description everywhere
Pick one spelling of your product name and one plain sentence that says what it does. Use them in page titles, headings, structured data, social profiles and directory listings. Two spellings of one name split the evidence that you exist.
- Step 6
Get listed where the answers come from
Ask ChatGPT your buyer questions and look at the sources it shows. Where those are directories, marketplaces or review sites, make sure you are listed there with the same name and description. Submit the listings yourself, and never buy reviews or placements.
- Step 7
Measure on a fixed set of questions
Write ten questions a buyer would ask, lock the list, and check it on a schedule. Answers vary from run to run, so one check proves little, while the same questions over weeks show a trend. RankingTop's free scan checks your AI-crawler access, llms.txt and structured data, and which domains show up for a few buyer questions.
Questions people ask next
How long does it take for ChatGPT to start recommending my site?
There is no published timeline. Changes that matter to ChatGPT search can count once your pages are recrawled and re-indexed. Changes to what the model learned in training count only when OpenAI trains and ships a new model.
Should I block GPTBot?
That is your call. GPTBot collects pages that may be used to train OpenAI's models, and OpenAI documents it as a separate control from OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User. If you want to appear in ChatGPT search, keep those two allowed whatever you decide about training.
Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor and not me?
OpenAI does not publish its reasons, so any precise answer is a guess. Check what you can: whether its crawlers can reach you, whether you have a page that answers that exact question near the top, and whether you appear on the sources it cited. Those are the gaps you can close.
Can anyone guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend me?
No. Nobody outside OpenAI controls which sources ChatGPT names, and the answers change between runs. Be wary of any service that promises a recommendation instead of describing the work it will do.