How to Rank in ChatGPT: What Makes It Recommend a Business

The short answer: ChatGPT doesn't keep a fixed league table you can climb. OpenAI says: "ChatGPT ranks search results using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information. Placement is not guaranteed." Our advice: let OAI-SearchBot crawl your site and publish clear facts about your business. Then make sure other websites describe you the same way.

Can you actually rank in ChatGPT?

ChatGPT ranks the web results it uses, but not the way Google does. There's no public position one, and there's no list of ten blue links. Each answer is written fresh, so "ranking in ChatGPT" means being named often, across many questions, for many different people.

Where does an answer come from? Two places. When it doesn't search, ChatGPT relies on what its models learned in training. At other times it searches the web, which OpenAI explains can happen "automatically when your question would benefit from current information." When it does search, ChatGPT picks web sources and can cite them with links.

Replies shift from one try to the next, too. Even OpenAI's guide to how its models are built admits that "the same question may yield different answers across different queries." If you test once on your own phone, you've learned little.

How does ChatGPT choose which businesses to recommend?

ChatGPT builds each answer from the question, the person's context and the sources it finds. OpenAI hasn't published a full formula, but its help pages name seven inputs, and each one gives a business something to check.

Input	What OpenAI's help pages say	What it means for a business
The question	ChatGPT "typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries" before it sends them to search partners	Cover the questions customers ask, not just one keyword
Location	It may use an approximate location from the IP address, so a request for good restaurants near you can become "top restaurants San Francisco"	Write the towns you serve as plain text on your pages
Memory	If memory is on, "ChatGPT may use relevant saved memories when rewriting a search query"	Two customers can see two different shortlists
Search providers	The page links to the privacy policies of Microsoft and Shopify for its search providers	Check your site is indexed in Bing (our advice)
Local listings	ChatGPT "may share your location with trusted third-party providers" for things like "nearby business listings"	Keep every listing accurate. OpenAI doesn't name these providers
Products	It considers "structured metadata from first-party and third-party providers (e.g., price, product description)"	Keep product data complete and current
Shops	Merchants are ranked "based on factors like availability, price, quality, and whether they are the maker or primary seller"	Show stock, price and who makes the item

Restaurants get an extra route, because ChatGPT can show reservation times from OpenTable, Resy or Yelp.

According to OpenAI, OpenTable reservations are available globally, while Resy works only in the United States and Yelp covers the United States and Canada. That leaves OpenTable as the only one of the three listed outside North America.

Shopify shops have it easier still. The shopping help article states that Shopify product data "is already integrated into ChatGPT through Shopify Catalog". It adds: "No additional work is required from individual merchants." If you sell on another platform, you can apply to send OpenAI a direct product feed.

Can ChatGPT find your website?

ChatGPT can only show your site in its search answers if OpenAI's search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, is allowed in. OpenAI says: "Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links."

OpenAI uses three different visitors, and each one has its own job:

Visitor	What OpenAI says it does	Does robots.txt apply?	What to do
OAI-SearchBot	Surfaces websites "in search results in ChatGPT's search features"	Yes	Allow it
GPTBot	Crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI's AI models	Yes	Your choice. It doesn't affect search
ChatGPT-User	Visits a page when someone asks ChatGPT a question	OpenAI says "robots.txt rules may not apply"	Nothing. OpenAI says it isn't used to decide what appears in Search

Three checks make sure ChatGPT can reach you:

robots.txt. Make sure nothing blocks OAI-SearchBot. These two lines allow it:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Allow: /

Your host or firewall. The search help article asks you to "confirm that the website host or content delivery network allows traffic from OpenAI's published searchbot IP addresses." Our advice is to check any security plugin as well, since a firewall rule can block a bot that robots.txt allows.
A day's wait. Changes aren't instant. In OpenAI's words, "it can take ~24 hours from a site's robots.txt update for our systems to adjust."

If your site runs through Cloudflare, check its AI bot settings too. Cloudflare's docs say new domains default to Allow for Search, Agents and Training, but an existing zone may have been changed. In the dashboard, go to Security, then Settings, filter by Bot traffic and open AI Crawler and Agent access policies. Make sure Search is set to Allow.

What should your website tell ChatGPT?

ChatGPT needs plain, checkable facts from your website: what you do, where you do it, who it's for and roughly what it costs. That's our advice, and published research on AI search points the same way.

A study called GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (accepted to KDD 2024) tested nine ways of rewriting web pages for AI answer engines. When the authors added citations, quotations from relevant sources and statistics, a source's visibility rose by over 40% across various queries. Keyword stuffing, the old SEO habit, did badly: the paper reports that "simple methods like Keyword Stuffing traditionally used in SEO don't perform well."

The GEO study isn't proof of how ChatGPT works. Its authors used a benchmark of 10,000 queries and a test engine built on GPT-3.5 Turbo, then ran a follow-up on Perplexity. ChatGPT search itself wasn't tested.

So treat the GEO study as a strong hint, not a rule. One finding suits small firms: the authors report that the method helped lower-ranked websites most.

Here's what we'd put on a small business website, based on that research and the OpenAI guidance above:

One page per service, with the towns you cover written as text, not only shown on a map.
Prices or price ranges wherever you can give them.
The same name, address or service area and phone number on every page and every listing.
Facts you can back up, such as qualifications, memberships and years trading, with links to the proof.
Short, direct answers to the questions customers ask, near the top of each page.

Do other websites shape ChatGPT's view of you?

Yes. ChatGPT doesn't rely on your website alone. OpenAI says its models learn partly from "information that is publicly available on the internet". Further down, OpenAI explains that this "may include publicly available webpages, public forums, public blogs, public posts, and other publicly available online content."

Reviews count too, at least for products. The shopping help explains that ChatGPT "may also display product review summaries" that "are based on reviews from public websites." Nobody checks those reviews first: "Reviews and ratings are not verified by OpenAI."

We can't tell you which directories or review sites ChatGPT reads, because OpenAI doesn't publish a list, and we won't guess.

Our advice is simple. Keep your details identical on every listing you control, and ask real customers for reviews. Correct wrong information wherever you find it.

Can you pay to appear in ChatGPT?

You can pay for an ad in ChatGPT, but you can't pay for a place in the answer. OpenAI says: "Ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT's responses."

Here are five facts about ChatGPT ads, all from OpenAI's help pages:

Where ads show: below a ChatGPT response, labelled and kept separate from the answer.
Who sees them: users on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts don't have ads.
How ads are picked: OpenAI considers "a combination of factors, including relevance and advertiser bids."
UK access: OpenAI's Ads Manager availability page lists the United Kingdom as available for self-service. The legal entity that advertises and is billed must be based in a listed country.
Shopping results: product results, according to OpenAI, "are not ads, nor influenced by any OpenAI partnerships."

Is an ad a recommendation? No. OpenAI is clear that "seeing an ad doesn't mean OpenAI endorses or recommends the advertiser."

How do you test your business in ChatGPT?

Ask ChatGPT the questions your customers ask, write down who it names, and repeat the same questions every month. One test proves little, because answers change with location, memory and chance. This is the method we use:

List 10 real customer questions, each with a town, such as "who's a good boiler engineer in Stockport?"
Ask each one with search on. People who aren't signed in can use web search too, according to OpenAI, so test signed out as well. That keeps your own saved memories out of it.
Note who's named and which sources are cited. Select Sources under a reply to see them.
Open the cited pages. OpenAI warns that "Search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect."
Repeat monthly with an unchanged list, so you're comparing like with like.

Testing through a VPN? That can skew things. OpenAI notes that a VPN or network location "may affect the approximate location inferred from your IP address."

Where should a small business start?

Start with access, then facts, then other websites, then tracking. This order is our own advice: there's no point polishing pages that OAI-SearchBot can't read.

Today: check robots.txt and any Cloudflare or firewall setting for OAI-SearchBot.
This month: make sure every service page states what, where, who for and how much.
Next: bring your listings and reviews in line with your website.
Every month: run the same 10 questions and note what changes.

Nobody controls ChatGPT's answers. If someone promises a top spot, they're guessing.

If you'd like us to do the checking and fixing, that's what our AI SEO for UK businesses covers. Our free AI visibility audit tests your business in ChatGPT and other assistants first. Listings matter here too, so our guide to a suspended Google Business Profile is worth a read if yours has gone missing.

Questions people ask

Does blocking GPTBot stop my site appearing in ChatGPT search?

No. Each robots.txt setting is independent, according to OpenAI. You can allow OAI-SearchBot so your site can appear in search results, and disallow GPTBot so your content isn't used for training.

Does ChatGPT use Bing or Google to search?

ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers, OpenAI explains. Its help article links to the privacy policies of Microsoft and Shopify for those providers. It doesn't say which provider handles which search.

Is ChatGPT search free?

Yes. According to OpenAI, web search is available on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu. People who aren't signed in can use it too, so your customers don't need a paid plan to find you.

How do I get ChatGPT to describe my business correctly?

Make the facts easy to find and consistent everywhere. Put your name, services, areas and prices on your own site, with matching details on your listings. If ChatGPT gets a product detail wrong, OpenAI's shopping page says you can report it from the product's menu.