How to Get ChatGPT to Recommend Your Business

A customer in Lagos asks ChatGPT for the best tailor in Surulere, or a shipping agent that handles Guangzhou to Apapa, or a paediatric clinic in Lekki that opens on Saturdays. It gives them three names. If yours is one of them, you got a customer you never advertised to. If it is not, that customer never knew you existed, and no amount of ranking on Google changed that.

Owners describe both sides of this in public. One shop owner reported the first sale to a customer who found them on ChatGPT, and added that the same customer also found their competitors. Another, who ranks second on Google for his own product, wrote that ChatGPT acts like his business does not exist. Both threads are linked in the references below.

This post is the answer to the question most of those owners typed next: how do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business? Six steps, in order, and the honest part at the end about how long it takes.

Why there is no form to fill

ChatGPT has no business directory and no listing page. It does now sell ads: since February 2026 OpenAI has shown labelled ads to people on its Free and Go plans, below the end of a response, and its help page states that ads do not influence the answers and that advertisers cannot shape, rank, or alter them. An ad is a separate box under the answer. The answer itself, the part a customer reads as a recommendation, is still built the same way: when ChatGPT needs current information, it searches the web with its own crawler and assembles an answer from what it finds. OpenAI's documentation names that crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and says two things that matter here: it finds sites by itself, and a site that blocks it will not appear in ChatGPT's search results.

So being recommended is the result of three conditions being true at once:

• ChatGPT can find you: your site is public, and the crawler is allowed in.
• ChatGPT can read you: at least one page states, in plain text, what you do, where, and for whom, as the answer to a question a customer would ask.
• ChatGPT can trust you: other places it reads say the same facts, and real people talk about you there.

Every step below makes one of those three conditions true. None of them costs money beyond the time to do them.

Step 1: Ask ChatGPT the question your customer asks

Before you change anything, find out where you stand. Open ChatGPT and type the question a real customer would type. Use your service and your area, and never your business name. "Best tailor in Surulere" tells you something. "Is Adebayo Tailors good?" tells you nothing, because you just handed it the name.

Write down which businesses it names, and anything it says about you if you appear. Do the same in Gemini and in Perplexity if you have five more minutes. Save the answers with today's date. This is your baseline, and step six brings you back to it.

Most owners who run this test for the first time are either absent or described wrongly. That is normal and it is the reason this post exists.

Step 2: Let the machine in

Your website has a small text file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt that tells crawlers what they may read. Some developers block every crawler they do not recognise, and some security plugins do it by default. If OAI-SearchBot is blocked, OpenAI's documentation is clear that you will not show up in ChatGPT search, and no amount of good writing fixes that.

Ask whoever manages your site to open that file and confirm that OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot are allowed. Perplexity documents the same rule for its own crawler. For Google, the condition is different and simpler: Google's documentation says a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear in normal search before it can appear in an AI Overview or in AI Mode, with no special optimisation required.

One more thing to check while they are in there: if your site is built so that the text only appears after JavaScript runs in a browser, some crawlers see an empty page. A quick test is to view the page source and search for your own phone number. If it is not in the source, the page is a blank to a machine that does not run scripts. A developer can fix this, and it is worth asking.

When this step is done you will see nothing change immediately, because OpenAI's documentation says changes to that file take about a day to take effect. Move on.

Step 3: Give it one page that answers the question

This is the step most businesses skip, because their website was written as a brochure. A brochure says "we are a leading provider of bespoke tailoring solutions". A customer asks "who makes agbada in Surulere and how long does it take?" Those two sentences never meet.

Write, or rewrite, one page so that it answers the customer's question directly:

1. Put the question, or a plain statement of it, in the heading.
2. Answer it completely in the first paragraph: who you are, what you do, where, for whom, and how to reach you. Someone who reads only that paragraph should have enough to call you.
3. Give specifics a machine can repeat: turnaround times, price ranges, areas served, opening hours, the named thing you are known for.
4. Add a short list of questions customers actually ask you on WhatsApp, each with a two-sentence answer.

The research on this is direct. In a paper presented at KDD 2024, Aggarwal and colleagues tested which changes to a page made generative engines more likely to use it, and the authors report that adding citations, quotations from sources, and statistics raised a page's visibility in the answers by up to 40% in their benchmark. The pattern underneath those findings is the same as the list above: concrete, attributable, quotable content gets used; vague content does not.

When this step is done you will have one page you could paste into ChatGPT yourself and get a correct answer from.

Step 4: Say the same facts everywhere

ChatGPT assembles an answer from several sources, and when they disagree it either picks one or hedges. The business whose name, address, phone number, services and opening hours are identical on its website, its Google Business Profile, and the directories that list it is the business a machine can describe with confidence.

Go through the places your business is listed and make them agree, word for word where it matters: the exact business name, the address written the same way, one phone number, one description of what you do. Claim your Google Business Profile if you have not, because it is one of the sources the engines read for local questions, and keep it current. Where a listing is wrong and you cannot edit it, ask the site to correct it.

When this step is done, the machine has no contradictory version of you to choose from.

Step 5: Get talked about where ChatGPT reads

A page about yourself establishes what you claim. Other people establish whether to believe it. The engines treat these differently, and the second kind of source is the one most Nigerian businesses have none of.

Semrush analysed which websites AI engines cite most often, and community sites such as Reddit and reference sites such as Wikipedia sat near the top of the list. For a small business the practical version is: reviews on your Google Business Profile, a presence in the directories your customers actually use, and honest answers in the forums and groups where people ask questions about your trade. When someone in a Lagos business group asks who can do a thing you do, a genuinely useful answer that happens to mention your business is worth more than any advertisement, because it is the kind of text an engine quotes.

Two rules. Never fake a review or pay for one; the engines are not the only ones who notice. And answer the question first, mention yourself second.

When this step is done, a search for your business by name turns up more than your own website.

Step 6: Measure it monthly, with the same questions

Go back to the list you wrote in step one. On the same day next month, ask the same five questions in the same engines and write down who is named. The questions must not change, or you are measuring the change in your questions rather than the change in your visibility.

Three things can happen. Your name appears where it did not: the work is paying off, keep going. Your name appears but the description is wrong: step four is unfinished, because the sources still disagree. Nothing has changed: check step two first, because a blocked crawler makes every other step invisible.

This monthly run is the whole measurement. It costs nothing and it is the only honest way to answer "is it working?"

What does not work

Three things owners try that waste the month:

• Asking ChatGPT to add you. It cannot. The owner in the Reddit thread who asked why his business was missing got "oh yes, that is another great company" and nothing changed.
• Stuffing the page with the words you want to be found for. The engines quote pages that read like a person wrote them for a person. A page that repeats "best tailor Lagos" nine times is less likely to be used, not more.
• Buying an ad and expecting the answer to change. A ChatGPT ad is a labelled box below the answer, and OpenAI says advertisers cannot alter the answer. Run ads if the numbers work for you, and measure them as ads. Being named in the answer is a separate result and it is earned, not bought.
• Buying a listing from someone who promises placement inside the answer. There is no such placement to buy. If their method is the six steps above, pay them for the labour and ask for the monthly measurement. If their method is a secret, keep your money.

How long it takes, honestly

Nobody can give you a date, and anyone who does is guessing. OpenAI publishes no timeline for how quickly a new or changed page is picked up by its crawler, and neither do Google or Perplexity. What you can say is that the work is measured in days to weeks rather than hours, that step two has a documented delay of about a day, and that step five builds over months because it depends on other people.

The adoption numbers say the wait is worth it:

Those customers are asking today. The businesses they hear about are the ones that did the six steps before they asked.

One forward before you go: send this post to whoever runs your website and ask one question: is our site blocking OAI-SearchBot? The answer is in a file called robots.txt and it takes them two minutes to check. If they do not know what that is, that is also an answer.

Frequently asked questions

Can I pay ChatGPT to recommend my business?

You can buy an ad, and you still cannot buy the recommendation. OpenAI has tested ads in ChatGPT since February 2026 for people on its Free and Go plans. Its help page, as of October 2026, says ads appear below the end of a response, clearly labelled as sponsored, and that advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT's responses. So an ad buys a labelled slot under the answer, never a place inside it. Anyone offering to get you named in ChatGPT's answer for a fee is either doing the six steps in this post on your behalf, which is legitimate, or selling something that does not exist.

Can I submit my website to ChatGPT so it knows about me?

There is no submission form. OpenAI's own documentation says its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, finds sites on its own, and that sites which block it will not appear in ChatGPT search results. The only submission you control is letting that crawler in and giving it something worth reading.

How long does it take for ChatGPT to start recommending a business?

Nobody can tell you honestly, because OpenAI publishes no timeline for how quickly a new page is picked up, and neither do Google or Perplexity. In practice the fixes in this post are measured in days to weeks, and the only reliable way to know is to ask the same question every month and record who is named.

I rank on the first page of Google. Why does ChatGPT not mention me?

Ranking and being recommended are two different results. Google ranks pages; ChatGPT assembles an answer from pages it can read and from what other sites say about you. A page can rank well and still be unreadable to the crawler, or readable but silent on the question the customer actually asked. The owner in the Reddit thread linked in the references ranked second on Google for his product and ChatGPT acted as if his business did not exist.

What should the page on my website actually say?

It should answer the question a customer would ask ChatGPT, in the first paragraph, in plain words, with your business name, what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you. Add a short FAQ in the customer's own words. One good page beats ten pages of brochure copy.

Is this the same as SEO?

The fixes overlap with good SEO, and a developer who says so is right. The difference is what gets measured. SEO measures rankings and clicks. AI visibility measures whether your name appears in the answer when a customer asks, which no SEO dashboard reports. You can do both; you have to measure the second one separately.

How do I know if it worked?

Write down five questions a real customer would ask ChatGPT about a business like yours. Ask them today and record which businesses are named. Ask the same five questions on the same day next month. If your name appears where it did not, it worked. If the answer describes you wrongly, the sources it read still disagree.

References & sources

1. OpenAI, OpenAI bots documentation (OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ChatGPT-User)
2. OpenAI Help Center, Ads in ChatGPT (read 7 October 2026: ads below the response, Free and Go plans, ads do not influence answers)
3. Google Search Central, AI features and your website (eligibility, no special requirements)
4. Perplexity, Perplexity crawlers (PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User)
5. Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024)
6. Semrush, The most cited domains in AI search (November 2025)
7. Owner report, ranks 2nd on Google while absent from ChatGPT, r/SEO (November 2024)
8. Owner report, first sale to a customer who found the shop on ChatGPT, and its competitors, r/ecommerce (January 2025)
9. Pew Research Center, Americans and AI 2026 (5,119 US adults, February 2026)
10. BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US adults)
11. DHL, E-Commerce Trends Report 2026 (29,000 shoppers across 29 markets)