How Do I Get My Business Mentioned in ChatGPT Answers?

A customer walks in and says "ChatGPT recommended you." Great. Then a different customer says ChatGPT recommended your competitor down the street. Less great. Now you want to know how to get on that list on purpose.

Here is the honest answer: there is no ChatGPT submission form, no secret prompt and no listing fee that guarantees a mention. When ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Mode answers a question about a business like yours, they search the same web everyone else reads. Your website. Your Google Business Profile. Review sites. Directories. What people say about you in forums.

So the job is not to trick a chatbot. It is to be easy to find, easy to quote, and described the same way everywhere. That is SEO and AEO done properly, and most of it you can start this week.

How do ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode find their sources?

Each vendor describes it a little differently, but the pattern is the same: the assistant runs searches, reads pages, and cites some of them.

ChatGPT search

OpenAI's help article on searching the web with ChatGPT says ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers and typically rewrites your question into one or more targeted queries it sends to them. It may use an approximate location from your IP address for local questions, so "good restaurants near me" becomes something closer to "top restaurants" plus a city. The same page lists Microsoft's privacy statement among those of the providers that may process those queries, which is one more reason to keep your Bing presence in order.

The same article is blunt about two things. ChatGPT ranks results using multiple factors, and placement is not guaranteed. And to be eligible at all, you have to let OAI-SearchBot crawl your site.

Perplexity

Perplexity searches the web as you ask and links each answer to its sources. Its crawler documentation says PerplexityBot is the crawler that surfaces and links websites in Perplexity results, and recommends allowing it in robots.txt if you want to appear.

Google AI Overviews and AI Mode

Google's guide to AI features and your website says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use "query fan-out," running several related searches across subtopics to find supporting pages. To be eligible, a page needs to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet. Google says there are no additional technical requirements and no special AI files or markup needed. (We wrote about what that means for agencies selling "AEO packages" in AEO is just SEO.)

Notice what is missing from all three: a form.

What does OpenAI's crawler documentation say about OAI-SearchBot vs GPTBot?

This is the one technical thing worth checking today, because if you (or your web host) ever blocked "AI bots" in a hurry, it is easy to have caught the wrong one.

OpenAI's crawler overview lists separate bots with separate jobs:

• OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in ChatGPT search. OpenAI says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers (they can still appear as plain navigational links).
• GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI's foundation models. Disallowing it signals your content should not be used for training. It does not control search visibility.
• ChatGPT-User visits a page when a person asks ChatGPT to. OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to these user-initiated visits, and this agent is not used to decide what appears in search.

OpenAI notes robots.txt changes take roughly 24 hours to apply. The practical version:

1. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
2. Make sure there is no Disallow: / under User-agent: OAI-SearchBot or User-agent: PerplexityBot.
3. Decide separately whether you want to allow GPTBot. That is a training question, not a visibility question.
4. Ask whoever runs your hosting or CDN whether a "block AI crawlers" setting is switched on. OpenAI's help article says your host or CDN also has to allow traffic from its published search bot IP addresses.

If robots.txt is not your idea of a fun afternoon, this is a five minute job for whoever looks after your website.

How can you test whether ChatGPT mentions your business?

Before you change anything, find out where you stand. Run the same five prompts in ChatGPT (with search on), Perplexity and Google AI Mode. Use a logged-out or fresh session so your own history does not flatter you, and include your city if you are a local business.

The five prompts

Write them the way a buyer would type them, not the way you describe yourself:

1. The category question: "Who are the best [your service] companies in [city]?"
2. The problem question: "My [problem your customers have]. Who should I call in [city]?"
3. The comparison question: "[Your business] vs [main competitor]: which is better for [use case]?"
4. The brand question: "What is [your business name] and is it any good?"
5. The specific need question: "Who does [a niche service you offer] for [type of customer] near [city]?"

What to record

Make a simple sheet with one row per prompt per assistant, and note:

• Are you mentioned? Yes or no, and where in the answer.
• Which competitors are mentioned instead.
• Which sources are cited (your site, Google, Yelp, a directory, a Reddit thread, a news article).
• Whether the description of your business is accurate: name, category, services, location, hours.
• Anything flatly wrong (a service you stopped offering, an old address, a closed location).

The cited sources column is the gold. It tells you which websites the assistants lean on for your category in your area. Those are the places you need to show up, correctly.

Answers change from run to run, so do this monthly, not once. One screenshot is an anecdote. Twelve months of rows is a trend.

Where do AI assistants get information about local businesses?

Your self-test will show you the specific sources for your niche. In most categories, the list looks something like this:

• Your own website. A clear page for each core service, your service area, and plain answers to the questions customers ask. Name, address and phone in text, not just in an image.
• Google Business Profile. Correct name, primary category, hours, services and photos. Our local SEO page covers the full setup.
• Bing Places for Business. Microsoft's tool for claiming and updating your listing in Bing Maps. Easy to ignore, quick to fix.
• Apple Business Connect, if your customers use iPhones and Apple Maps.
• Review platforms that matter in your category: Google reviews, Yelp, and the vertical ones (Healthgrades, Avvo, Houzz, Tripadvisor, G2, whichever your buyers actually read).
• Industry directories and associations: your trade association, chamber of commerce, licensing boards, certification bodies.
• Local press and community sites: news coverage, sponsorship pages, event listings.
• Reddit and forums, where relevant. If your self-test shows forum threads being cited, people in your area are asking about your category there. Show up as a helpful human, not an ad.

You do not need all of them. You need the ones that appear in your cited sources column, plus the big listings.

Why does consistency across the web matter so much?

An assistant that browses is stitching together an answer from several pages it found in a few seconds. If your website says "family dentist," your Google profile says "cosmetic dentistry," Yelp says "orthodontist" and an old directory still lists the address you left three years ago, the assistant has to guess. You would rather it didn't.

Google's own Business Profile guidelines push the same discipline: use your real-world name as it appears on your signage and stationery, and pick as few categories as possible, ones that complete the sentence "this business IS a."

Apply that everywhere:

• Name: identical spelling everywhere. No keyword stuffing ("Smith Plumbing Best Plumber Austin").
• Category: one primary category, the same idea on every platform.
• Services: the same short list, in the same plain words, on your site and your listings.
• Location and contact: one address format, one main phone number.
• The one-sentence description: write it once ("We are a [category] in [city] that [does what] for [whom]") and reuse it.

Boring? Extremely. It is also the part most of your competitors skip.

What should you not bother with?

Skip anyone promising you will "rank #1 in ChatGPT." No vendor controls that, and OpenAI's own help center says placement is not guaranteed. Skip paying for a separate "GEO" program that repeats your SEO work under a new name. And skip special AI files: Google says you don't need them for its AI features. The generative engine optimization work that matters is the same work: a crawlable site, clear answers, accurate listings, real reviews, and people talking about you.

What should you do this week?

1. Check robots.txt for OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot.
2. Run the five-prompt self-test in three assistants and save the sheet.
3. Fix the most wrong listing you find.
4. Write your one-sentence description and paste it everywhere.

If you want help with the rest, that is what our SEO and AEO work covers. Or book a free call and bring your self-test sheet. We will tell you what it says.