Someone just asked ChatGPT to recommend a business like yours.
It named three companies. You were not one of them.
That happens thousands of times a day now. And most business owners have no idea it is happening at all.
Learning how to get recommended by ChatGPT and Claude is now a real job, sitting quietly next to your normal marketing.
Here is the good news. Getting recommended by ChatGPT is not magic. It runs on rules you can learn in an afternoon.
Here is the catch. ChatGPT and Claude do not read the same part of the internet. So doing one thing well does not get you both.
In this guide, you will learn how to:
- Get into the two search engines these tools actually read
- Write answers an AI can quote without breaking them
- Earn the kind of mentions that make AI trust you
- Check what ChatGPT and Claude say about you right now
- Skip the one tactic everyone repeats that does nothing
Key Takeaways
- ChatGPT pulls its live results from Bing. If Bing has not saved your page, ChatGPT cannot quote it.
- Claude pulls from Brave instead. Same question, different front door.
- ChatGPT names roughly 4 to 8 sources per answer. Claude names about 2 to 4, so it is the harder room to get into.
- Being recommended by ChatGPT depends mostly on other websites, not your own. What other people write about you matters more.
- Reddit is the most quoted site on the internet by AI tools. One study of 150,000 citations put it at 40%.
- Write short answers that make sense on their own. If your answer needs a run-up, it will not get quoted.
- Original numbers get quoted. Summaries of other people’s numbers do not.
- llms.txt does not work. A study of 300,000 sites found no lift at all.
- Your robots.txt matters far more. Block the wrong bot and you vanish.
- Fixing Bing can work in weeks. Everything else takes months. Anyone promising faster is guessing.
Why Getting Recommended by ChatGPT Is a Different Job From Claude
They shop in different places.
When ChatGPT looks something up, it uses Bing. When Claude looks something up, it uses Brave.
That one fact changes everything. You can rank beautifully on Google and still be invisible to both of them.
It is a bit like being famous in one country and completely unknown next door.
They also hand out a different number of seats. ChatGPT usually names 4 to 8 sources. Claude names about 2 to 4.
Fewer seats means a higher bar. Claude also leans towards official sources, research, government pages and major news.
One more thing worth knowing. These tools do not search the web for every question.
They search far more often when the question sounds like buying. Words like review, compare, price or a year all trigger a live search.
Which is lucky, because those are the questions that turn into customers.
ChatGPT is bigger, but Claude is not small
Both are worth winning. Ignoring Claude because it is smaller is a mistake, especially for business buyers.
Note the units differ: ChatGPT reports weekly users, Claude monthly. Figures via DemandSage ChatGPT statistics and DemandSage Claude statistics, 2026.
7 Proven Steps to Get Recommended by ChatGPT and Claude
Do these in order. Jumping to step five first is why most people see nothing happen.
1. Get Into Bing (Not Just Google)
If Bing has not saved your page, ChatGPT cannot quote it. Full stop.
This is the cheapest step toward being recommended by ChatGPT. It is also the one almost nobody checks.
Here is how to fix it:
- Open Bing Webmaster Tools and verify your site
- Submit your sitemap
- Check your main pages say indexed, not just discovered
Plenty of sites do fine on Google and have thin coverage on Bing. Nobody ever looked, so nobody ever fixed it.
Good news: this is the same crawling health you already need for technical SEO. No new project required.
2. Make Sure Brave Can See You
Claude runs on Brave Search. Brave builds its own list of pages rather than borrowing someone else’s.
Getting recommended by Claude starts here, so test it. Search your brand name on Brave and see what comes back.
Nothing there? Then Claude cannot see you either, no matter how good your Google ranking looks.
The fix is boring: clean crawling, a working sitemap, nothing blocked by accident, and enough other sites linking to you that Brave bothers to keep you.
3. Write Answers That Survive Being Copied
An AI does not read your page like a person does. It grabs a chunk and drops it into an answer.
So your chunk has to make sense alone. If it needs the paragraph above it to be understood, it will not get used.
Think of it like a sentence taken out of a book and read out loud at a party. Does it still land?
Most of getting recommended by ChatGPT comes down to that one test.
Three habits that make your writing easy to quote:
- Ask, then answer. Make the heading a real question. Answer it in the first two lines under that heading. No warm-up.
- Name things fully. Write “Bing Webmaster Tools” instead of “the tool”. Pronouns lose their meaning the moment a chunk gets lifted.
- Put numbers in words, not pictures. Prices, sizes and dates need to be readable text. A number stuck inside an image might as well not exist.
This is the same discipline behind good SEO content writing. AI tools just punish sloppiness faster.
4. Earn Mentions on Sites AI Already Trusts
Here is the part nobody wants to hear, and it is the biggest single lever on getting recommended by ChatGPT.
Most of what an AI thinks about your business comes from other websites. Not yours.
You can write the most beautiful page in the world about how great you are. The AI files that under “well, they would say that”.
One study looked at over 150,000 links quoted by AI tools. Three sites dominated the whole list.
Three sites do most of the talking
Share of citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews in a study of 150,000+ cited links.
Source: Semrush analysis of 150,000 AI citations across 5,000 keywords, reported by DesignRush. These shares move around a lot month to month, so treat them as a direction, not a promise.
You cannot buy your way onto that list. You also should not try to fake it.
People spot a company pretending to be a happy customer roughly as fast as they spot a wig in a windstorm. Communities remember, and the internet keeps receipts.
What actually works:
- Be genuinely helpful in public. Answer real questions in forums and communities where your buyers hang out. Use your real name.
- Get on the “best of” lists. Directories and roundups in your industry get quoted constantly. Ask to be considered.
- Publish something only you could publish. Your own data. Your own numbers. Nobody else can copy that.
- Collect real reviews. On real platforms. AI tools read them.
This is old-fashioned reputation work. A steady link building programme now doubles as AI visibility work, which is a nice bonus for something you were probably doing anyway.
5. Publish Numbers Nobody Else Has
AI tools love a source. A real number with a real story behind it is the easiest thing in the world to quote.
Summaries of other people’s numbers? Those get skipped. Why quote the person quoting the person?
You already have data. For example:
- Average delivery time across your last 500 orders
- What your customers actually pay, in ranges
- The five questions your support team answers every single week
- Before and after results from your own projects
Write it up plainly. Say how many things you counted and when you counted them. That is it.
One page of your own numbers will do more for your AI search visibility than ten pages rewriting somebody else’s.
Further reading: our guide to ranking in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews goes deeper on how your own data feeds AI answers.
6. Check Your robots.txt Before You Do Anything Else
This one takes five minutes, and it has quietly ended more AI search visibility projects than any other single line of text.
A file called robots.txt sits on your site and tells bots where they may go. Somebody, at some point, may have blocked the AI ones.
Often that somebody was a plugin, acting on your behalf, without mentioning it.
OpenAI runs two different bots and they do two different jobs:
| Bot name | What it does | If you block it |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | Builds the search index ChatGPT uses to find live answers | You disappear from ChatGPT results |
| GPTBot | Collects pages used for training future models | Training only. Search is unaffected |
| ChatGPT-User | Fetches a page when a user asks for that link | Your page will not open inside ChatGPT |
Lots of sites blocked all three in one go back when “block the AI bots” was the popular advice. Then they wondered why ChatGPT never mentioned them.
Go and look at yours right now: type your domain, then /robots.txt, into a browser. It takes ten seconds and the result might explain everything.
While you are in there, make sure your schema markup is clean too. It will not put you in an answer by itself, but it helps machines agree on who you are.
7. Keep Your Facts the Same Everywhere
AI tools trust facts that repeat. Being recommended by ChatGPT is partly just being described the same way everywhere.
If your website, your Google listing, your LinkedIn page and three directories all say the same thing, that thing gets treated as true.
If they disagree, the model hedges. Hedging sounds like “some sources say”, and “some sources say” does not win customers.
Make these match everywhere you appear:
- Your business name, spelled the same way every time
- What you do, in one sentence
- Where you are and who you serve
- Founding year and team size
Boring? Yes. It is the flossing of digital marketing. It is also the fastest way to stop an AI describing your company as something you stopped doing in 2022.
If you serve a city or region, your local SEO listings are doing double duty here.
The One Tactic You Can Safely Ignore
llms.txt.
The idea was neat: a small file that lists your best pages, so AI tools know where to look.
The problem is that nobody reads it. Google has said it does not use it. A scan of around 300,000 sites found no visibility difference between sites with the file and sites without it.
It became the kale smoothie of SEO. Everyone recommends it, nobody can point to what it fixed.
Add it if you like. It costs nothing. Just do not add it instead of the seven steps above, because none of them are optional if you want to get recommended by Claude or ChatGPT.
ChatGPT vs Claude: What to Do Differently
The seven steps get you most of the way with both. Here is where getting recommended by ChatGPT and getting recommended by Claude pull apart.
Same question, different route in
Where each assistant looks when it decides to search the live web.
- Searches via Bing
- Names 4 to 8 sources
- Likes clear, current, well-structured pages
- Blocked by a bad robots.txt line
- Searches via Brave
- Names 2 to 4 sources
- Prefers official, research and news sources
- Harder to enter, longer to stick
Source counts are typical observed ranges, not published limits.
What About Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot?
Good news. The same seven steps cover them.
Only the front door changes. Copilot uses Bing, so step one already covered it. Gemini uses Google, which you were working on anyway. Perplexity runs its own crawler and leans hard on fresh pages and forum threads.
So you are not building five strategies. You are building one, then checking that five doors are unlocked.
A simple monthly routine that keeps you moving:
- Week one: run your five questions on every assistant you care about and log the answers.
- Week two: fix anything factually wrong, at the source rather than at the chatbot.
- Week three: publish one page that answers a real customer question properly.
- Week four: earn one honest mention somewhere outside your own website.
Four small jobs a month. Do that for six months and you will have moved further than most of your competitors will all year.
Selling products instead of services? The same rules apply, and product pages have an extra advantage: specs, sizes and prices are exactly the kind of hard facts these tools like to quote. Our notes on eCommerce SEO go deeper on that, and the case studies show what the work looks like in practice.
How to Check What ChatGPT and Claude Say About You Today
Do this before you change anything. You need a starting score for your AI search visibility.
Open ChatGPT and Claude in separate tabs. Ask both the same five questions, worded like a customer would word them:
- “Best [what you do] companies in [your city]”
- “Who should I hire for [the problem you solve]?”
- “[Your brand] vs [your biggest rival]”
- “Is [your brand] any good?”
- “How much does [your service] cost?”
Write down three things for each answer:
- Were you named at all?
- Which websites did it link to?
- Was anything it said about you wrong?
That third one is the reason to do this. Brands find out they are described using a service they dropped years ago, or a price they no longer charge.
It is a bit like overhearing someone introduce you at a party using a job you had in 2019.
The pages it linked to are your target list. Those are the pages worth getting your name onto.
Repeat the same five questions monthly. Same wording, same day of the month. Otherwise you are comparing apples to weather.
How Long Does It Take?
Honest answer: getting recommended by ChatGPT takes as long as your worst broken step.
| What you fix | Typical wait |
|---|---|
| Unblocking a bot in robots.txt | Days to weeks |
| Getting indexed in Bing | 2 to 6 weeks |
| Rewriting pages to be quotable | 1 to 3 months |
| Earning mentions on trusted sites | 3 to 6 months |
| Being named in Claude answers | 6 months and up |
There are quick wins and there is slow work. Anyone promising you will get recommended by ChatGPT in 30 days is selling the second sort as if it were the first.
5 Mistakes That Keep You Out of AI Answers
- Only checking Google. Neither tool uses it for live search. Check Bing and Brave.
- Writing for word count. A 4,000 word page with a buried answer loses to a 900 word page with a clear one.
- Faking community mentions. It gets caught, and the cleanup costs more than the shortcut saved.
- Hiding key facts in images. Prices, hours and specs must be readable text.
- Treating this as separate from SEO. It is the same foundation. A solid SEO audit finds most of these problems in one pass, and AI search optimization is where the rest gets handled.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I pay to get recommended by ChatGPT?
No. You cannot pay to be recommended by ChatGPT. There is no advertising slot inside its answers today, and no way to buy a place in the source list. Anyone offering you one is either confused or lying.
Does ChatGPT search the web for every question?
No. It answers plenty of questions from memory. It searches far more often for questions about products, prices, comparisons, local services and anything tied to a recent date.
Why does Claude never mention my business?
Usually one of two reasons you are not getting recommended by Claude. Either Brave Search does not have your pages, or Claude has only two to four slots and it is filling them with bigger, more official sources. Check Brave first.
Do I need to be on Reddit to get cited by AI?
It helps, but it is not required and it cannot be forced. Being genuinely useful in any community your buyers use works the same way. Posting promotional replies from a fresh account works against you.
Should I add an llms.txt file to my site?
You can, but expect nothing from it. Google has confirmed it does not use the file, and a study of roughly 300,000 sites found no measurable difference. Spend the time on Bing indexing instead.
Is blocking GPTBot the same as blocking ChatGPT search?
No, and this trips up a lot of sites. GPTBot collects pages for training. OAI-SearchBot builds the index ChatGPT uses to find live answers. Blocking GPTBot is a reasonable choice. Blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from ChatGPT results.
How do I fix wrong information an AI gives about my company?
Fix the sources, not the chatbot. Nothing you say to ChatGPT in a chat window changes what it recommends tomorrow. Update your own pages, then update every directory, profile and listing that still carries the old detail. Once the outside world agrees, the answers follow within a few weeks to a few months.
Does schema markup get me into AI answers?
Not on its own. Schema will not get you recommended by ChatGPT by itself. It helps machines agree on what your page is and who you are, which supports everything else. It is a helper, not a lever.
How many sources does ChatGPT show in one answer?
Usually four to eight. Claude typically shows two to four. That is your competition: not the top ten of a search page, but a handful of slots.
Is getting recommended by ChatGPT different from ranking on Google?
Yes and no. The groundwork behind being recommended by ChatGPT is the same as Google: crawlable pages, clear answers, real trust signals. What changes is the index it reads from and how few slots there are. You can rank well on Google and still be missing entirely.
Can a small business really compete here?
Yes. Small firms get recommended by Claude and ChatGPT all the time, often more easily than they rank on Google. Specific questions get specific answers. A small firm with real data, honest reviews and one clear page about a narrow problem can beat a huge brand with a vague one.
The Bottom Line
Getting recommended by ChatGPT and Claude is not a new discipline. It is the old one, done properly, aimed at two search engines most people forgot about.
Nothing on this list is exotic. Your AI search visibility is built from the same parts as everything else you already do.
Start with the cheap wins. Check robots.txt. Get into Bing. Search yourself on Brave.
Then do the slow work: clear answers, your own numbers, and a reputation built in public. That is the whole recipe for getting recommended by ChatGPT.
There is no trick here. Which is annoying, and also the reason it keeps working.
Want a second pair of eyes on where you stand? Book a free 30 minute call and we will run the five questions on your brand together. If you would rather read first, the Google SEO Starter Guide covers the foundation this all sits on, and our SEO services page explains how we handle it.
