To get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, make it easy for them to verify. These assistants tend to name businesses whose details they can confirm across several consistent sources: your website, your listings, your reviews and mentions elsewhere. You cannot pay for a place in their answers, but you can remove the doubts that make them skip you.
This guide explains how each assistant finds businesses, gives seven steps you can start this week, and shows how to test where you stand. Nobody can promise that any business will be recommended, and results change from one day to the next, so treat these steps as ways to improve your chances.
None of the three publishes a ranking formula, and none lets you submit your business for inclusion. What they do publish is how their crawlers and search features reach your site. As of 9 November 2026:
| Assistant | What its own documentation says | What to do |
| ChatGPT | “Any public website can appear in ChatGPT search.” OAI-SearchBot controls inclusion in summaries and snippets; GPTBot is a separate crawler for training. | Do not block OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt. |
| Gemini and Google AI features | A page must be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet to be a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Google says there are no additional technical requirements and no special optimization. It also advises keeping Business Profile information up to date. | Make sure Googlebot can crawl and index your pages, and keep your Business Profile current. |
| Perplexity | PerplexityBot surfaces and links sites in results. Perplexity-User fetches a page when someone asks a question and generally ignores robots.txt. | Allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt. Changes can take up to 24 hours to apply. |
Two things follow from this. First, getting found is mostly access plus clarity: let the crawlers in, then make your pages and your listings easy to understand. Second, there is no AI-only trick. Google says plainly that standard search fundamentals are what apply to its AI features, and the other two tools lean on the same open web.
The assistants also read what others say about you. For local questions, that means your Google Business Profile, your reviews and the directories where your name, address and phone appear. Our guide to how AI search engines verify local businesses explains why consistent details across those sources matter, and our overview of AI SEO for businesses shows where this fits in your wider search plan.
Work through these in order. Each one says what to do and how to check it.
Write your business details once, exactly as you want them shown, and use that version on every site. Small differences count: “Suite 4” in one place and “Ste. 4” in another, or an old phone number on a forgotten directory. When sources disagree, an assistant has less reason to trust any of them. Our guide to inconsistent listings and AI search explains the effect, and NAP consistency covers the basics.
How to check: search your phone number and your address in quotes on Google and note every listing that shows something different.
Claim your Google Business Profile, Apple Business listing, Bing Places, Yelp and Facebook Page, then fill in every field: categories, services, hours, website, photos. Add the industry directories your customers actually use, such as a trade body or a review site for your field. Google specifically advises keeping Business Profile information up to date.
How to check: search your business name on each platform and confirm the listing is yours and complete.
Your home page, service pages and location pages should state in plain words who you are, what you offer, which area you serve and how to contact you. Avoid slogans where a fact would do. If you add structured data such as LocalBusiness schema, make sure it matches the text on the page. Google says no special schema is needed for its AI features, so treat it as a way to be clear, not a trick.
How to check: read your home page as a stranger. Can you tell in ten seconds what the business does and where?
Reviews are independent evidence that real customers exist. Ask every happy customer, aim for a steady flow rather than a burst, and reply to reviews, good and bad. Follow each platform’s rules, and never pay for or write reviews yourself.
How to check: look at the number, the dates of the latest five reviews, and how many have a reply.
A mention on a local news site, a chamber of commerce page, a supplier’s partner list or an industry association page confirms you exist beyond your own website. Look for places that would genuinely list a business like yours, and make sure each one uses your standard details.
How to check: search your business name in quotes and count independent sites that mention you.
Check your robots.txt file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Make sure it does not block Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search) or PerplexityBot (Perplexity). Also check that your host, CDN or security plugin is not blocking them, because Google and Perplexity both mention firewall and hosting settings. Your choice about AI training is separate: OpenAI’s GPTBot is for training, not for search results. Use each company’s own documentation for current crawler names, because they change.
How to check: open your robots.txt and read it line by line, then ask your web developer about firewall rules. In Search Console, use URL Inspection to confirm Google can fetch key pages.
Customers ask assistants questions like “who does boiler repair near me?” or “how much does a dental crown cost?”. Add a short FAQ to your main pages answering the questions your customers really ask: services, prices or price ranges, service areas, hours and how to book. Keep important information as text, not only in images or PDFs.
How to check: list the ten questions customers ask most on the phone. Is each one answered on your site?
The same ideas have worked on client sites. The two results below are in Google’s AI features, AI Overviews and AI Mode, which is where we have measured so far.
Booking service: GAMCA Medical Appointments. We mapped the full booking process into clear steps, fees and documents, and added country-specific landing pages. The site went from no citations to being cited in AI Mode and AI Overviews for its core queries. It is also featured in People Also Ask and fee answer boxes, and ranks for country searches such as Kenya and India. Read the AI SEO case study.
B2B consultancy: Rava Global Solutions. We built topic clusters across integration, ERP and CRM, wrote answer-ready content and added location landing pages. The site now has more than 100 page 1 keywords, up from fewer than 10. It is quoted in AI Mode for competitive queries and listed above some software vendor pages in AI summaries. Read the second AI SEO case study.
Two other client sites, an online hardware store and a legal services website, also appear as sources in Google AI Overviews after product-page work and a full technical cleanup.
What these projects share is not a trick. Each one made pages clearer and more specific, so they answered real questions, which is what steps 3 and 7 above are about. Results vary by site and AI platform, and citations can change over time.
Before you change anything, find out how the assistants describe your business today. Then repeat the test every month. Use these five prompts in ChatGPT (with search on), Gemini and Perplexity, replacing the brackets with your own details:
Write each result in a log so you can compare it later:
| Date | Assistant | Prompt | Named you? | Details correct? | Sources shown |
| 9 Nov 2026 | Perplexity | Prompt 1 | Yes or no | Yes or no | Sites it cited |
Take a dated screenshot of each answer. The same prompt can give different answers on different days, so run each one at least twice, a few days apart, and judge the pattern, not a single reply. Pay most attention to prompts 3 and 4: if an assistant gets your address, phone or hours wrong, trace the wrong detail to the site it came from and fix it there.
If you are not named at all, our guide to why your business is not in ChatGPT lists the usual causes and fixes.
A few shortcuts can hurt more than they help:
Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity?
Not for a place in the answer itself. None of the three offers a way to buy or submit a recommendation. What you can do is make your business easy to find, verify and understand, using the steps above.
How long does it take to appear?
There is no fixed time. Some changes, such as allowing a blocked crawler, can take effect within a day (Perplexity says up to 24 hours for robots.txt changes), but earning consistent mentions and reviews takes weeks or months. Nobody can guarantee a result.
Do I need a different plan for each assistant?
Mostly no. The same basics apply to all three: crawlers allowed, consistent details, clear pages, reviews and mentions. The differences are small: ChatGPT search relies on OAI-SearchBot, Google’s AI features need your pages indexed and eligible for a snippet, and Perplexity uses PerplexityBot.
Do I need special schema or an AI text file?
For Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google says no: there are no extra technical requirements and no special schema or AI text files needed. Structured data is still worth adding if it matches your page text, because it makes your details clearer.
Will blocking GPTBot stop me appearing in ChatGPT?
OpenAI describes GPTBot as the crawler for training and OAI-SearchBot as the one that controls inclusion in ChatGPT search results, so they are set separately. Make the training choice deliberately, and check OpenAI’s current page before changing either rule.
The steps above are straightforward but time-consuming, especially cleaning up listings across dozens of sites. Our AI SEO services cover the listings, website and monitoring work that helps assistants find and trust your business. Contact us for a free look at how your business shows up today.
