How to get your business cited by ChatGPT

Before you start: what “cited” means

ChatGPT can mention your business in two ways. It can name you in the text, and it can cite one of your pages as a source with a link. They are different outcomes with different fixes, and the second is rarer. Score them separately; the free check does that for you.

This guide is about ChatGPT’s search behaviour, which is what happens when someone asks it for a current recommendation. For how ChatGPT compares with Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI features, see how AI engines choose their sources.

Step 1 — Make sure ChatGPT can reach you

OpenAI runs three separate agents, and they are easy to confuse:

Agent	What it does	What blocking it does
OAI-SearchBot	Finds pages to show in ChatGPT search answers	Removes you from ChatGPT search answers, apart from plain navigational links
GPTBot	Collects training data	Nothing to ChatGPT search; the settings are independent
ChatGPT-User	Fetches a page when a user asks it to	OpenAI says it is not used to decide what appears in search

Open your robots.txt and confirm OAI-SearchBot is not disallowed. Then check that nothing upstream blocks it either: a firewall rule, a bot-protection setting or a security plugin can refuse it without any robots.txt entry. Changes take about 24 hours to register.

Step 2 — Be indexed where ChatGPT looks

ChatGPT search rewrites the question into “one or more targeted queries” and sends them to third-party search providers. OpenAI does not publish the full list, but Microsoft is the one it names. Most Australian businesses watch Google Search Console closely and have never opened Bing Webmaster Tools. Fix that: verify the site in Bing, submit the sitemap, and use IndexNow so new and updated pages are picked up quickly. Bing’s own tools now report how often your content is cited in Copilot and Bing’s AI answers, which is the closest thing to a free AI citation report available.

Do not over-read the Bing connection, though. Studies of how closely ChatGPT’s citations match Bing’s rankings range from 87% on 100 queries to about 8% on 15,000 prompts. Being in the index is necessary; it is not a ranking you can chase.

Step 3 — Measure before you change anything

Write ten questions a buyer would ask to find a business like yours — never your brand name — and run them in a temporary chat. Record whether you are named, whether you are cited, and which sources are cited instead. How to check if ChatGPT mentions your brand has the full method. Without this baseline you will not know whether anything below worked.

Step 4 — Get mentioned on the pages ChatGPT already retrieves

This is the step with the largest effect, and the one most often skipped. The cited sources from Step 3 are, in effect, the shortlist ChatGPT draws on. If you are not on them, improving your own site will not put you there.

The research agrees on direction. Earned media is cited roughly 325% more than brand-owned content. In ChatGPT specifically, AirOps found domain authority and backlinks showed no positive correlation with citation. Ahrefs found brand web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks. What matters is being talked about on the right pages, not linked to.

In practice that means the roundups, directories, industry bodies and review platforms in your category. In our own category, the hiring questions were answered almost entirely from “best agencies” lists. Get onto them by being worth including, not by paying for placement you cannot disclose.

Step 5 — Make your own pages easy to retrieve and quote

Your own pages still matter for the narrower searches ChatGPT invents. The AirOps study gives some specifics: pages whose headings closely matched the query were cited 41% of the time against 29%, and pages of roughly 500 to 2,000 words did best. Put the answer first, in a sentence that stands on its own, and back it with a number and a source. Keep the page current: 73% of pages ChatGPT cited in Seer Interactive’s 2026 study had been updated in the past year. Update the pages that matter rather than publishing a new page for every phrasing.

Step 6 — Make it unambiguous who you are

ChatGPT will not confidently recommend a business it cannot identify. Use the same name, address format and description everywhere you appear; link your profiles from your organisation markup with a sameAs list; and keep an active review profile. Deep entity linking measured +34% citations in one 90-day controlled study, and brands with no active review profile appeared in 1% of answers against 75.3% for brands actively collecting and responding to reviews.

Step 7 — Re-measure on a schedule, and expect noise

Run the same prompts monthly. Answers vary run to run — SparkToro found less than a 1-in-100 chance of the same brand list twice — so judge the trend over three runs, not the first one. And do not build on a single source: ChatGPT’s use of Reddit went from close to 60% of responses to around 10% in about six weeks in 2025.

What not to do

• Do not mass-produce pages for every variation of a question. Google already treats content made for fan-out queries primarily to manipulate AI answers as scaled content abuse, and more pages do not mean more citations: most pages ChatGPT retrieves are never cited.
• Do not buy schema markup as the fix. A 1,885-page study found no measurable lift from adding it.
• Do not trust one result, good or bad, from your own logged-in account. Memory and personalisation flatter you.

If you sell products rather than services, there is a separate shopping layer with its own rules; see AEO for ecommerce.