How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT

Short answer. ChatGPT recommends businesses it can find through its search tools and can confirm across several sources. To get there: do not block OpenAI's search crawler, get properly indexed in Bing, earn reviews and mentions on the sites ChatGPT cites, and write pages that answer the question in the first two sentences. Then track it, because ChatGPT tags its referral links with utm_source=chatgpt.com.

This is not theory for us. We do all of this on our own site, and Slice of the Pie gets real leads from people who clicked through from chatgpt.com. Below is exactly what we set up and why.

Asking about Google AI Overviews instead? That runs on Google's own index and rules, and we covered it in how to show up in Google AI Overviews. This post is about ChatGPT, which works differently.

UTM behavior from OpenAI's Publishers and Developers FAQ. Crawl timing from OpenAI's crawler documentation. GA4 channel from Google Analytics "What's new," May 13, 2026.

How does ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?

When ChatGPT searches the web, it rewrites the question into search queries, sends them to its search partners, reads what comes back, and cites the sources it used.

OpenAI's help center says ChatGPT search "typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries" that it sends to third party search providers, and it names Microsoft as one of them. It also names Shopify, which matters if you sell products. So when someone asks "who is the best roofer in Salem" or "best clean lip liner under 30 dollars," ChatGPT is not reaching into a secret list. It is running searches, reading pages, and summarizing.

So you have three jobs. Be findable by those searches, readable by OpenAI's crawler, and present on enough trusted pages that ChatGPT feels safe naming you.

You cannot buy your way in, either. OpenAI states that product results in ChatGPT "are selected independently by ChatGPT and are not ads," and that ads are kept separate from product results.

Can ChatGPT actually see your website?

Only if you let OAI-SearchBot in. Plenty of sites block it without knowing.

OpenAI runs three different bots, and people mix them up constantly.

OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers, and OpenAI Help Center, Publishers and Developers FAQ.

The one that matters for being recommended is OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI's publisher FAQ is blunt: make sure you are not blocking it. Changes to robots.txt take about 24 hours to take effect.

Where this bites people: security plugins, hosting firewalls and CDNs. Since July 1, 2025, Cloudflare has asked every new domain about AI crawlers at signup and starts it with AI crawler blocking on, so an owner who clicked through setup may have walled off ChatGPT without realizing it. Check your robots.txt and your firewall rules, not just one of them.

Our own robots.txt explicitly allows OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Bingbot. We did that on purpose, because AI answers are a real referral source for us.

Does Bing matter for ChatGPT recommendations?

Yes. Microsoft is one of ChatGPT's named search partners, so if Bing cannot find you, you are starting behind.

Most businesses we audit have never opened Bing Webmaster Tools. Fix that this week.

• Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. You can import straight from Google Search Console.
• Turn on IndexNow. Bing recommends it for keeping AI answers current, saying it helps AI systems reference the most current version of a page.
• Open the AI Performance report. Launched in public preview on February 10, 2026, it shows how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and select partner integrations, plus the grounding queries that pulled you in.
• Local businesses: claim Bing Places. Whitespark's research into how ChatGPT ranks local businesses looked at Bing Places results across 153 queries and found Facebook and Yelp were the review sources that showed up most often.

The AI Performance report is not a ChatGPT report. It is still the closest free signal you have for whether Microsoft's index sees you as worth citing.

Do llms.txt and schema markup help you show up in ChatGPT?

Schema helps a little and is worth doing anyway. llms.txt is unproven, and nobody should charge you real money for it.

llms.txt was proposed by Jeremy Howard on September 3, 2024, as a plain text summary of your site for AI systems. OpenAI has never said ChatGPT search reads it. Google's John Mueller said none of the AI services have said they use it and compared it to the old keywords meta tag. Google Search has since said in writing that it does not use it. We still have one at sliceofthepie.co/llms.txt, because it took ten minutes and costs nothing. That is the right amount of effort.

Schema is different. OpenAI has not published anything saying ChatGPT reads structured data directly either. But ChatGPT leans on Bing, and search engines do read schema. Organization or LocalBusiness markup with your real name, address, phone and service area, Product markup with price and availability, and FAQ markup on pages with genuine questions all make your facts easy to extract. Do it because it is good SEO, not because someone sold it as an AI hack.

For e-commerce there is a much bigger lever than either. OpenAI says Shopify product data is already integrated into ChatGPT through Shopify Catalog. On March 24, 2026, OpenAI expanded shopping in ChatGPT and confirmed Shopify merchants are included with no extra work. If you are not on Shopify, OpenAI publishes a product feed spec for sending your catalog directly. Either way, the quality of your product titles, descriptions and prices is now an AI visibility issue, not just a Google Shopping one.

Why do reviews and third-party mentions matter so much?

Because ChatGPT rarely takes your word for it. It recommends businesses that other sites vouch for.

Ask ChatGPT for the best plumber in your town and look at the sources. You will usually see review sites, directories, local news and Reddit threads before any plumber's own blog. The same pattern holds across AI search. A Foundation Marketing and AirOps study that tracked more than 28 million AI responses to local discovery questions found Yelp was cited 512,680 times in Q4 2025, 3.4 times more than the BBB. Most of those citations came from Google AI Mode and Perplexity, but the lesson carries over. The platforms that answer local questions trust review sites.

For products, OpenAI says ChatGPT may show review summaries "based on reviews from public websites." So your reviews on your own store, on Amazon, on Reddit and in real editorial roundups all feed what ChatGPT says about you.

Do not buy fake reviews or spammy mentions. It breaks platform rules, and Google has already called inauthentic mentions less helpful than they seem. Ask every happy customer for a review. Pitch the local paper a real story. Get into the gift guide by being worth writing about.

What does answer-first content look like?

The first two sentences answer the question completely. Everything after is proof.

AI systems pull short passages. If your page opens with 200 words about family values before it says what the job costs, the passage ChatGPT needs is buried. This post is built the other way: every header is a question people actually type, and the first sentence under it is the answer.

What that looks like on a real business page:

• A local HVAC company: the furnace replacement page opens with your real installed price range and how long the job takes. Then the breakdown, the brands you install, your warranty and real photos.
• A DTC skincare brand: "This cleanser is built for dry, sensitive skin and contains no fragrance or sulfates. Use it morning and night." Then ingredients, who it is not for, and reviews.

Real numbers, names and dates get quoted. Vague claims do not.

How do you track ChatGPT referrals in GA4?

Look for the AI Assistant channel or filter for utm_source=chatgpt.com, then tie it to leads or orders.

OpenAI says ChatGPT automatically adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to referral links. On May 13, 2026, Google Analytics added an AI Assistant channel that groups traffic from assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, with the medium set to ai-assistant. The rollout is staged and it is not retroactive, so write down your baseline the week you see it.

If your property does not have it yet, build a custom channel group in GA4 with a rule where session source matches a regex like chatgpt|openai|perplexity|gemini|claude|copilot, and place it above Referral so the traffic does not get lumped in there.

Then connect it to money. For a service business, make sure calls and form fills are key events and look at them by channel. For a store, look at orders and revenue by channel. And add "ChatGPT or AI search" as an option on your "how did you hear about us" question, because plenty of people read ChatGPT's answer, then search your name on Google, and show up as branded search. GA4 will never see that part.

Does any of this actually produce leads?

Yes. It does for us, and the setup is not complicated.

On sliceofthepie.co we explicitly allow the AI crawlers in robots.txt, keep an llms.txt, write answer-first posts with named sources like this one, and track AI referrals in GA4. Leads come in straight from chatgpt.com referrals. We do not publish the numbers, but we watch that channel every week.

We do the same work for clients through our SEO services. Slice of the Pie works nationwide with home services businesses and DTC brands, and we cap it at 30 clients. For service businesses, our Lead Gen All In package is 2,000 dollars a month and covers Google Ads, Meta Ads, creative, local SEO and Google Business Profile, and a custom website. For stores, see ecommerce pricing, where the All-in-One tier includes SEO content every month. Everything is on the pricing page.

Related resources

• How to show up in Google AI Overviews →
• SEO and local SEO services →
• Google Ads for Shopify brands →