Guide

How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business

No one can buy or switch on a ChatGPT recommendation. What you can do is make your business easy for ChatGPT to find, match, and already know. Here is what the research says works, and what doesn't.

By MentionBerry · Published Nov 6, 2026 · 9 sources linked

Short answer

There is no setting, form or payment that makes ChatGPT recommend a business; OpenAI says "placement is not guaranteed." What helps: let its search crawler in, have pages that answer buyers' questions in buyers' words, get listed on the pages it reads, and be known well enough that it names you from memory. Tricks like stuffing pages with statistics mostly don't work.

The steps

  1. Find out what ChatGPT says today, more than once. Ask the questions your buyers ask, several times each, in a clean session, and count how many answers name you. One answer is close to random: brand lists rarely repeat (our guide on why). How to do it: check your brand mentions in ChatGPT.
  2. Let ChatGPT's search crawler in. OpenAI says "to make a website eligible for inclusion, allow OAI-Searchbot to crawl the site", and sites that block it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers." It is separate from GPTBot, which collects training data, so you can allow one and block the other. A change to robots.txt takes about 24 hours to apply. (OpenAI crawler docs; OpenAI Help Center, archived copy of Oct 23, 2026)
  3. Answer the questions buyers ask, in their words. Make a page for each kind of question (best X for a situation, X vs Y, price, how to choose), with the answer near the top. See the two findings below.
  4. Get listed on the pages ChatGPT reads. Being among the pages ChatGPT's search retrieves matters far more than how your own page is written (below). Ask ChatGPT your buyers' questions, note which websites it links to, and work on being included there: "best of" lists, reviews, directories, forums and industry articles.
  5. Be known beyond search. ChatGPT often names brands without any page to back the mention (below). That comes from how widely and consistently your business is described across the web over time, which is slow to change and worth keeping consistent: the same name, description and facts everywhere.
  6. Measure again, the same way. Same questions, same number of runs, same clean session. A change only counts when it is bigger than the run-to-run noise (how we count).

What the research shows

0% → 35.4% When prompts described what the buyer needed instead of just the product type, the tool brand Craftsman went from never being recommended in the top five to appearing in 35.4% of drill recommendation lists. With category-only prompts, many large brands (L.L.Bean, REI Co-op, Black+Decker, Braun, Philips) were never recommended at all. The models were tested through their developer APIs with web search turned off, 40 runs per category per model. Source: Malthouse et al., "Evaluating Brand Retrieval and Ranking in Large Language Model Recommendations", arXiv, Sep 14, 2026

What it means: the words of the question decide which brands come up. Describe your business by the needs and situations your buyers name, not only by your product category.

32% vs 2.8% How much of the difference in which pages of a website got cited was explained by whether ChatGPT's search retrieved the page (32%), against all the page's own features together (2.8%), over three months of daily questions. Retrieved pages that ChatGPT ranked first were cited 43.8% of the time; pages it ranked 11th to 20th, 3.5%. Pages whose title and paragraphs matched the question were cited more. Source: Chen and Koudas, "What Drives AI Citations?", arXiv, Oct 10, 2026. Collected through OpenAI's developer API from a monitoring platform the authors run.
46% In the same study, 46% of ChatGPT's mentions of brands the question didn't name had no cited page that named them. The model named them from what it had learned in training. Source: Chen and Koudas, arXiv, Oct 10, 2026
1 in 5 → 1 in 43 The share of ChatGPT answers that cited Reddit, in March and in late September 2026. Wikipedia fell from about 1 in 7 to 1 in 35 over the same months. Which sites ChatGPT cites shifts quickly, so check what it cites for your own questions now instead of relying on an older percentage. Source: Ahrefs, Oct 12, 2026. Ahrefs sells an AI visibility tracker.

What doesn't work

  • Rewriting tricks. A test of ten popular rewriting methods (adding statistics, quotes, citations, technical terms, simpler language and others) found significant gains in only 3 of 54 cases. Adding statistics lowered a page's rank in 19 of 24 settings. Moving a page to the top of the retrieved results, by contrast, lifted it 2.77 places, against 0.36 for the best trick. The authors conclude that ordinary SEO, which gets a page retrieved in the first place, is "significantly more effective." (C-SEO Bench, Puerto et al., NeurIPS 2025; the work was supported by NAVER, which runs a search engine; a lab test, not live ChatGPT.)
  • Special files or markup for AI. For Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google says "you don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup" (Google Search Central). In the Toronto study, FAQ blocks and schema.org markup went with slightly lower odds of a citation, not higher.
  • Paying ChatGPT. There is no paid placement in ChatGPT's answers; OpenAI's help page says "placement is not guaranteed" even for sites its crawler can reach.

How long it takes

A robots.txt change takes about a day. New pages have to be found and indexed first. Being named from memory changes slowest, because it depends on how the model was trained. Measure monthly with the same questions so you can tell a real change from noise.

Waitlist

Find out if your changes worked

MentionBerry will count how often ChatGPT names you before and after a change. Join the waitlist and we'll email you when it opens.

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