# Get ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity to recommend you

> Open your site to AI crawlers and search indexes, publish pages answering buyers' questions, get onto the sites assistants cite, and measure answers weekly.

Published: 2026-10-21 · Updated: 2026-10-23
Source: https://www.itgrows.ai/business/blog/how-to-get-your-business-recommended-by-chatgpt
Publisher: ItGrows (https://www.itgrows.ai/business) — AI visibility for businesses

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To get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, make sure their crawlers and the search indexes they rely on can reach your site, and publish pages on your own domain that answer the exact questions your buyers ask. Then get mentioned on the third-party sites the assistants already cite, and measure the answers every week across all four, because results change from run to run and nobody can guarantee a mention.

The rest of this page walks through each step, with our own measurements and one embarrassing mistake of ours as evidence.

## When does an assistant name a business at all?

Assistants recommend businesses only on some questions. In a test on 23 September 2026 with 20 German business questions, the model answered 10 without searching at all and cited nobody. Where it did search, it cited primary sources (laws, ministries, the OECD, large accounting firms) on 9 of 10. Firms were named only on 'who should I hire' or 'how do I choose' questions, and two runs of the same question named two different sets of firms.

A local example shows the same split. On 20 October 2026, for an orthopaedic practice in Bonn, the four assistants named the practice in 12 of 80 answers to 20 patient questions: Claude 5 of 20, Gemini 4, ChatGPT 2, Perplexity 1. 'Who should I go to' questions named practices. Questions about costs, risks and treatments named none.

So you are aiming at two things. Be the business named when a buyer asks who to choose, and be the cited source when they ask how something works, because those source pages are where the assistant picks up who exists in your field.

## Can the assistants actually reach your site?

Check access before you write anything. Our own site failed this check for ten weeks without anyone noticing, as described below. There are three layers to look at.

### Search indexes

The four assistants do not share one index. When they search the web, ChatGPT leans on Bing, Gemini on Google, Claude's web search on Brave Search, and Perplexity runs its own crawler, PerplexityBot. In practice that means four checks: Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools (submit your sitemap and ping new URLs with IndexNow), whether Brave Search returns your pages, and whether PerplexityBot appears in your server logs.

Google has been explicit that this is mostly ordinary SEO work. Its [Search Central blog](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/05/a-new-resource-for-optimizing) says SEO best practices remain foundational for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and its guidance, as [summarised here](https://www.thekeyword.co/news/google-ai-search-optimization-guide), states there is no separate ranking or retrieval system for those features and advises against relying on llms.txt files, content chunking or AI-specific rewriting.

Being indexed is necessary, though not sufficient. On 19 October 2026 we asked assistants for the exact titles of 18 articles, each older than three weeks, on three client sites. ChatGPT found 1 of 18; Claude found 7 of 18. Google had indexed 29 of 30 articles of one of those sites. Being in Google's index did not mean an assistant could find the page.

### Crawler access and robots.txt

Here is our own mistake. On our site, a robots.txt rule meant to hide a single redirect page, `/b`, was written as a plain prefix. Robots.txt rules match prefixes, so from 11 August to 21 October 2026 that one line also closed `/blog`, `/business` and every article in our business blog to all crawlers. Bing Webmaster Tools had listed our business page as 'discovered but not crawled' since 11 August 2026, and Google had none of the business pages indexed. We changed the rule to `/b$` on 21 October 2026.

Nothing looked broken from the outside: the pages loaded fine in a browser. Read your robots.txt line by line, test your most important URLs against it, and check firewall and bot-protection settings as well. Our guide on [allowing GPTBot in robots.txt](https://www.itgrows.ai/business/blog/how-to-allow-gptbot-in-robots-txt) covers the exact rules.

AI crawlers are not a side issue. In the retained nginx logs of an edtech platform we work with, pickaclass.com, from 28 July to 11 August 2026, ClaudeBot made 19,272,125 requests, Meta-ExternalAgent 3,854,076, GPTBot 2,744,985, Applebot 2,655,555, Amazonbot 1,170,268 and Googlebot 52,292. If your hosting or CDN throttles heavy bots, these are the bots most likely to be affected. You can see who visits you by [finding AI crawlers in your server logs](https://www.itgrows.ai/business/blog/how-to-see-ai-crawlers-in-server-logs).

### Live retrieval

A separate group of agents (ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Perplexity-User) fetch a page while an assistant is answering a real person. In the same fortnight the edtech platform received 1,918 such fetches on content pages, and a client blog of a few dozen articles received 56 across 24 different articles. These fetches are the closest thing you have to proof that real conversations are touching your pages.

## What should you publish on your own site?

Publish pages that each answer one question your buyers actually ask, with the answer in the first lines. Write down the questions a prospect asks before calling you: what it costs, how long it takes, how to choose a provider, what can go wrong, how you compare with the alternative. Each one deserves its own page. If you sell software, our piece on [how a SaaS company becomes visible to AI assistants](https://www.itgrows.ai/business/blog/how-a-saas-company-becomes-visible-to-ai-assistants-mvb1etnl) goes into the question types that matter there.

Make those pages worth citing. The [original GEO research](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.09735v2) found that adding citations, quotations from relevant sources and statistics increased a source's visibility inside AI-generated answers by over 40% across tested queries. Concrete numbers, named sources and clear claims give an assistant something to quote.

Volume of useful pages matters more than markup. One site we measured had complete markup (server rendering, Article, FAQPage and Organization JSON-LD, a sitemap) but only 75 URLs, and it was still absent from answers on its own article's exact topic. A site with about 190,000 crawlable URLs was crawled constantly. Structured data is worth having, but it does not replace a body of pages that answer questions.

This work pays off slowly and unevenly. In our weekly measurement of 20 October 2026, Perplexity cited an article we had published on a client's site, a German company-formation advisory. That was one citation, on one assistant, for one article.

## Where else does your business need to appear?

Assistants cite other people's sites at least as often as yours. For the Bonn practice, the directory jameda.de was cited in 12 answers, and competing practices' own websites were the most cited sources.

Our own category shows the same thing. On 21 October 2026 we put 20 English and 20 German questions about getting a business into AI answers to all four assistants, three times each. ItGrows was named in 0 of 160 answers and none of our pages was cited. English answers most often cited firstpagesage.com and llmpulse.ai (8 answers each), help.openai.com (7), and blog.hubspot.com, ahrefs.com and searchengineland.com (6 each). German answers most often cited geoagentur.de (6) and help.openai.com (5). Most cited sources were the blogs of GEO agencies and tool vendors themselves. As tools, the English answers named Profound in 12 answers, Semrush 9, Otterly.AI 8, Peec AI 8 and Ahrefs 7.

The lesson for any business: ask your own buyer questions, note which sites the assistants cite, and work on being present there, whether that is a directory, a review platform, an industry publication or a comparison article. Your own pages and third-party mentions reinforce each other.

## How do you know whether it is working?

Not from analytics. In about two weeks of logs from three of our course websites, roughly 1.2 million requests in the two busiest logs, human visitors arriving from AI assistants were: Copilot 1; ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Meta AI and others 0. Assistants mostly answer in place rather than send a click, so you have to measure the answers themselves.

Ask the same fixed set of buyer questions to each assistant several times. An assistant asked the same question three times often names different businesses, so we count a business as named for a question if any of three asks names it, and we compare weeks only on the same questions and the same number of asks. A [2026 survey of GEO research](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.14035) reaches the same conclusion: different engines cite different ecosystems of sources, citations vary across repeated runs, and engines sometimes attribute claims to pages that do not support them, so visibility has to be measured across engines and over time.

It is cheap to do yourself. With API prices of October 2026, one question asked once with web search costs us about $0.069 with Claude, $0.010 with ChatGPT, $0.009 with Gemini and $0.0013 with Perplexity. A report of 20 questions x 4 assistants x 3 asks costs about $5.40.

When it works, the result shows up in sales conversations rather than dashboards. As reported by the clients in October 2026: FreightSizer, a B2B SaaS for freight dimensioning, got 2 new B2B customers in one month, both from ChatGPT; MagiScan, an iOS 3D-scanning app, gets hundreds of installs a month from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini; appslift, an app store optimisation service, gets 2 to 5 leads a month from AI assistants. Ask new customers where they heard of you.

| Step | What to check | Sign it is done |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Indexing | Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Brave Search, PerplexityBot in logs | Key pages indexed in Google and Bing, not 'discovered but not crawled' |
| Crawler access | robots.txt prefixes, firewall and bot protection | AI crawlers and live retrieval agents appear in server logs |
| Own pages | One page per buyer question, answer first, sources and numbers | Assistants find your pages when asked about their topics |
| Third-party presence | Sites the assistants cite for your questions | Your business appears on those directories and publications |
| Measurement | Fixed questions, four assistants, three asks each | A weekly count you can compare like for like |

If you want this done for you, ItGrows publishes question-answering articles on your domain, fixes crawler access and indexing, and measures your buyer questions weekly on all four assistants, for $499 a month (plus a one-time $499 setup, free with 3 months or a year). To see where you stand first, the [free check](https://www.itgrows.ai/) generates five buyer questions from your homepage and shows in about 30 seconds whether ChatGPT and Perplexity name you.

## Frequently Asked Questions

**How long does it take before an assistant recommends my business?**

There is no fixed timeline, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. Pages first have to be crawled and indexed, and even then, in our 19 October 2026 test, articles older than three weeks were mostly not yet findable by assistants. Measure weekly and judge the trend over months.

**Do I need llms.txt or special schema markup?**

Google's guidance advises against relying on llms.txt files or AI-specific rewriting. Schema markup is fine to have, but a site we measured with complete markup and only 75 URLs was still absent from answers on its own topic. Pages that answer real questions matter more.

**Can anyone guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend my business?**

No. Answers vary between runs and between assistants, and the businesses named for one question can change from one ask to the next. What you can control is access, useful pages, third-party presence and honest measurement.

**Should I block AI crawlers to save server load?**

That is a trade-off. AI crawlers can be your heaviest bot traffic, but blocking them, deliberately or by accident as we did with one robots.txt line, keeps your pages out of what assistants can read. If load is a problem, fix it at the hosting level rather than closing the door to the crawlers and live retrieval agents.