How do I get my product or business shown in ChatGPT?

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If it blocks OAI-SearchBot, or blocks all crawlers, ChatGPT's search cannot read your pages and will not cite them. OpenAI documents its crawlers separately: OAI-SearchBot for search, GPTBot for training data, and ChatGPT-User for pages fetched when a user asks. You can block training and still allow search, and many businesses that want visibility but not training use do exactly that.

Some security and CDN services block AI crawlers by default. If your site sits behind one, check its bot settings as well as robots.txt — this is the most common reason a site with no robots.txt problem still never appears.

Then check what a crawler actually receives. Several AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. If your product descriptions, prices or reviews only appear after scripts load, they may be invisible to the systems you are trying to reach.

People ask ChatGPT specific questions: "best CRM for a ten-person agency", "quiet dishwasher under $1,000", "accountant in Toronto for freelancers". It recommends products it can describe confidently in those terms. A homepage full of adjectives gives it nothing to work with.

Say, in plain sentences, who the product is for, what it does, what it costs or how pricing works, where it is available and how it differs from the obvious alternatives. Put each answer near the top of its own section so it can be lifted without the paragraphs around it. Name the business and the product in those passages; a sentence that only says "our solution" loses its subject when quoted.

Honest comparison pages help, including ones that say when a competitor is the better fit. They answer exactly the question buyers are asking, and a page that admits trade-offs reads as more trustworthy to a person and to a model.

When ChatGPT recommends products, it leans heavily on what other sources say. Review platforms, industry comparison articles, well-known directories, Reddit and forum threads, and press coverage all carry weight, and often more weight than your own site, because they are independent of you.

Audit what those sources currently say. Outdated pricing on a comparison site, a discontinued product still listed, or a directory with the wrong category all feed into answers. Correct what you can, ask for updates where you cannot, and earn new coverage the slow way: by being worth writing about and by asking satisfied customers for genuine reviews.

What does not work: paying for fake reviews, seeding forums with sock-puppet recommendations, or hiding instructions to AI models in your pages. Platforms detect and remove the first two, and engines treat the third as manipulation.

Changes to your own site can show up in ChatGPT's search-based answers within weeks, once the pages are recrawled. Changes to what third parties say take longer, because the coverage has to exist before it can be found. Changes to the model's built-in knowledge wait for a new model.

To tell whether anything is working, write down ten to twenty questions a real buyer would ask, run them in ChatGPT on a regular schedule, and record which brands are named. Do the same in Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews, because a business that improves in one usually improves in the others. One conversation proves very little; the trend across a fixed set of questions is the signal.