How to get your business to show up in ChatGPT

Somebody asked ChatGPT for the best plumber in your town and it named four businesses. None of them was yours. The obvious next question is where you go to fix that, and the honest answer is the one nobody selling AI visibility services wants to lead with: there is nowhere to go. There is no form, no dashboard, no submission process and no paid placement.

There is no form, and there is no listing

This is worth saying flatly because a small industry has grown up around implying otherwise. OpenAI does not operate a business directory. There is no equivalent of a Google Business Profile inside ChatGPT, no verification step, no category to choose and nothing to claim. When ChatGPT names a business it is either repeating something it absorbed while being trained, or it has just run a search and is summarising the pages it found.

If somebody offers to get your company listed in ChatGPT for a monthly fee, ask them which of those two things they are changing. In practice the answer is usually that they will add you to a set of directories, which is a real if modest tactic, described honestly further down this page, and not a listing in ChatGPT.

The two ways ChatGPT ends up naming a business

From what it learned

Ask a general question with no browsing and the model answers from what it absorbed during training. For a business to be in there, it has to have been described enough times, consistently enough, across enough of the public web, that the association survived. For a national brand that is routine. For a five person firm in one town it is unusual, and it is not something you can arrange in a quarter.

OpenAI's documentation names the crawler behind this half as GPTBot, described as the one that will crawl content that may be used in training generative AI foundation models. Note the tense. Anything it collects affects a future model, not the one answering today.

From a search it ran while answering

Most questions that name a place or ask for a recommendation now trigger a search, and the answer is assembled from pages fetched at that moment, usually with citations. This is the half worth working on, because it behaves much more like search always has. Pages that are crawlable, clearly written and actually answer the question get quoted. Pages that do not, do not.

The crawler for this half is a different one, and confusing the two is the single most expensive mistake we see.

Why your business is not showing up

In our experience the reason is almost always dull, and almost always one of these six.

• Your robots.txt blocks the crawler that feeds ChatGPT's search results, usually because it was added during the wave of AI blocking a couple of years ago and nobody revisited it.
• The facts an assistant needs are on your site only as pictures. Opening hours inside a poster graphic, prices inside a PDF menu, the service list inside a hero image with text baked into it.
• Nothing outside your own domain describes what you do. A business that appears nowhere except on its own website is a business with one source, and one source is thin evidence.
• You are described differently in different places. Three variations of the company name, two addresses, an old phone number on a directory nobody has looked at since 2019.
• Your pages talk about your values and your journey rather than what you sell, to whom, where, and for how much.
• You are genuinely new, or genuinely small, in a category with a hundred alternatives. This is a real answer and it deserves saying rather than being papered over with tactics.

Check what it says about you today

Do this before changing anything, and write the answers down. It takes about ten minutes and it is the only baseline you will get. If you would rather have something do it for you, we have compared the tools that automate exactly this, with what each costs and where the free option runs out. What those tools cost, tier by tier, is set out separately: the published range runs from 29 euros a month to 800, and the cheapest plan covers more AI engines than one well known product's 99 dollar one.

Let the right crawler in

This is the one genuinely technical item on the list, and it is worth doing first because it is binary. OpenAI publishes four separate agents and they do different jobs. Blocking the wrong one removes you from ChatGPT's search results entirely, which is a much bigger penalty than most site owners realise they opted into.

Open your own robots.txt in a browser and read it. If it disallows any of the first three, decide deliberately whether you meant to. The distinction that catches people out is that allowing GPTBot does nothing for how you appear today, and blocking OAI-SearchBot damages it immediately. Several sites did exactly the wrong pair.

Be described the same way everywhere

An assistant assembling an answer about a small business is reconciling several sources. Where they agree it states the fact confidently. Where they disagree it either hedges or picks whichever source it trusts more, and that will not always be you.

So the unglamorous work is real work: one spelling of the business name, one address, one phone number, one description of what you do, repeated identically on your website, your Google Business Profile, your social profiles and the three or four directories that actually cover your industry. Not similar. Identical.

Get named on pages you do not own

This is the part with the highest ceiling and it is not a trick. Assistants weight independent description heavily, because a business describing itself is not evidence of anything. A local news mention, a supplier's stockist page, a trade association member list, a genuine review on a site your industry actually uses, a partner's case study. Each one is a source that agrees you exist and says what you do.

One caveat worth stating, since this is where the money gets wasted. Bulk directory submission packages produce dozens of near identical pages on sites nobody reads, and assistants discount them for the same reason people do. Four relevant mentions beat sixty irrelevant ones, and the sixty carry a real risk of introducing inconsistent details that then need cleaning up.

Answer the question in the words people ask it

Pages that get quoted tend to state an answer plainly, near the top, in the language of the question. Pages that get skipped bury the answer under positioning. If people ask how much something costs, the page should contain a number or a range and the reason for it, in text.

This is not a new discipline. It is the same instinct as writing something genuinely useful, which Google has been describing for years in its guidance on creating helpful, people-first content. The change is that being the clearest answer now gets you quoted as well as ranked.

Put the facts in text

Prices in a PDF, hours in a poster image, the service list rendered as part of a hero graphic. All of it is invisible to the thing reading your site. Google's own advice on AI features is to make important information available as text, supplemented by images rather than replaced by them, and the same applies to every assistant.

What does not work

Being specific about this is more useful than another list of tactics, because most of the wasted effort we see is enthusiastic rather than lazy.

• Special files for AI crawlers. Google states directly that site owners do not need to create new machine readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in its AI features. Adding one is cheap and harmless, but treat anyone presenting it as the answer with caution.
• Writing best plumber in Manchester forty times across your site. Repetition was a weak signal for search engines and it is a weaker one for a model reading for meaning.
• Paying for AI visibility listing packages. Ask precisely what changes. If the answer is directory submissions, price it as directory submissions.
• Generating a hundred thin pages to cover every phrasing. Volume without substance is the exact pattern both Google's helpful content guidance and every assistant's summarisation step are built to discount.
• Publishing on your own site that you are the best. No assistant treats self description as evidence, and neither does anyone else.

Where social media actually fits

The useful part is narrow. Your profiles are public pages that state your name, your location and what you do, and they are usually crawlable, so they contribute to the consistency described above. Fill them in completely and make sure they say the same thing as your website. An abandoned profile with an old address is a source of contradiction, which is worse than no profile at all.

What social media does not do is substitute for the rest of this list. If you want the honest version of what it does and does not achieve for a small business, we wrote it in is AI social media worth it for a small business, and the more general question of what to publish is in what a small business should actually post about.

How long any of this takes

For the search half, allow weeks rather than days, and expect it to move roughly in step with your ordinary search visibility, because it depends on the same crawling and indexing. Fixing a robots.txt block is the exception, since that can change what is available almost immediately.

For the training half, nobody outside OpenAI can tell you, and the honest expectation is that a small local business may never be in there in a meaningful way. That is not a failure. Being reliably found by the search half is the achievable goal, and it is where the enquiries come from anyway.

The short version

• Read your robots.txt today and make sure OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User are not blocked.
• Run the five questions in the table above and save the answers, including the cited sources.
• Fix every inconsistent name, address, phone number and description across your own site, your Google Business Profile and the directories your industry actually uses.
• Move prices, hours and service lists out of images and into text.
• Earn three or four genuine mentions on sites you do not own, and stop there rather than buying sixty.
• Rewrite your two most important pages so the answer comes first and the positioning comes second.