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How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business (a 7-step plan)

By the CiteFinder team · November 2, 2026 · 7 min read

ChatGPT and the other AI assistants recommend businesses that the web already talks about, on pages they can read and trust. You can't pay for a spot or submit your site to them. You can make yourself much easier to find and quote. This is the same plan CiteFinder reports give our customers.

1. Write down the questions your buyers ask

Not keywords: full questions, the way people type them to an assistant. “What's the best payroll software for a business with fewer than ten employees?” “What are good alternatives to QuickBooks Payroll?” Aim for 20 to 30, covering “best X”, “alternatives to [competitor]”, “X for [specific situation]” and “X vs Y”.

2. Check where you stand on every engine

Ask each question on ChatGPT, Google (AI Overviews and AI Mode), Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot, with web search on. Note whether you're named, in what position, whether your site is linked, and which competitors are named instead. By hand that's 150+ answers; a free CiteFinder scan does 3 questions across all 7 engines in a couple of minutes.

3. Find the pages AI cites for your questions

Every answer with web search lists its sources. Collect them. In our scans the same few kinds of page come up again and again: “best tools” roundups on publishers like HubSpot, Forbes and TechRadar; review sites like G2 and Capterra; and competitors' own pages. (See which sites AI cited most.)

4. Get onto the pages that name your competitors but not you

This is the highest-leverage step. Sort the cited pages into three groups:

• Pages you can add yourself: directories, review sites, comparison sites, community threads. Create the profile or answer the thread.
• Editorial pages: roundups and reviews. Email the author with something genuinely useful: new data, a free account to test, a fact their list is missing.
• Competitor pages: they won't add you, but they show what content wins. Publish your own better version (step 5).

5. Publish a page for every question you're missing

If AI names three competitors for “best X for small teams”, you need a page that answers exactly that, honestly, with your product in context. Comparison pages (“You vs Competitor”), “alternatives to” pages and use-case pages work well. Lead with the direct answer in the first two sentences, use tables for facts like price and features, and add an FAQ that uses the buyer's wording.

6. Make your site easy for AI to read

• Don't block AI crawlers (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) in robots.txt, and check your firewall doesn't either.
• Put your key copy in the HTML, not only in JavaScript.
• Add Organization schema, FAQ schema and a clear meta description.
• Add an llms.txt file that says plainly what you do.

Do this, but don't expect it to work alone. Our own site passes all of these checks and was named in 0 of 172 answers on launch week, because few other sites had written about us yet.

7. Re-check weekly and double down on what moves

AI answers change as the web changes. Re-run the same questions each week and watch which ones flip first; that tells you which pages and mentions are working. Expect weeks, not days: engines need to find and re-read the new pages.