How to get your business listed on ChatGPT (AEO)

01How do I get my business listed on ChatGPT?

"Listed" means one of two things.

In ChatGPT's answers. OpenAI's help page gives one eligibility step: allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl the site, and make sure your host or CDN lets traffic through from OpenAI's published IP addresses. There's nothing to submit. The same page says ChatGPT ranks results on multiple factors and that "Placement is not guaranteed."

In ChatGPT's plugin directory. That's an app customers connect to, and it goes through OpenAI's review. It's a separate project, covered in how to submit an app to ChatGPT.

Paying isn't a third route into the answers: ChatGPT ads appear below the response and don't change it.

02What is AEO?

AEO is the work of getting a business mentioned or cited in answers from AI assistants and AI search. The terms aren't standardized. Semrush defines AEO as marketing practices that raise a brand's visibility in AI-generated answers. Microsoft's advertising guide spells it "Answer/Agentic Engine Optimization" and aims it at agents and assistants.

03AEO vs SEO vs GEO: what's the difference?

Google's guide names AEO and GEO and treats both as SEO, for Google Search. It says AI Overviews and AI Mode have no additional requirements beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet.

Outside Google, a few things differ: assistants use their own crawlers, several of them don't run JavaScript, and measurement is thinner. Crawlable pages, clear facts and a good reputation serve all three.

04How do I appear in ChatGPT search and get my website indexed?

Allow assistants' search crawlers in robots.txt. OpenAI and Anthropic separate search from training, so you can stay in their answers and still opt out of training.

A robots.txt that stays in answers and opts out of training at OpenAI and Anthropic:

``` User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-User Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot Disallow: / ```

OpenAI says a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to apply. Check your CDN too, because a bot rule there blocks a crawler whatever robots.txt says. Google also has a Search Console setting that excludes a site from its generative AI features; check that it isn't set to exclude.

05How do I make my website appear on ChatGPT if it's built with JavaScript?

Serve the main content in the HTML your server sends, through server-side rendering or pre-rendering. Vercel and MERJ measured crawler traffic in December 2024 and found that OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot didn't render JavaScript, while Gemini (through Googlebot's infrastructure) and Applebot could. That's nearly two years old and doesn't cover Claude-SearchBot. Still, a page that needs a script to show its text is a risk you can remove.

To test it, turn JavaScript off in your browser and reload. What's left is what those crawlers would have read.

06Does structured data help?

For Google, it isn't required: Google's guide says there's no special schema.org markup for generative AI search, and that structured data remains useful for rich results.

The largest study available is SISTRIX, published 22 October 2026: 96,418 URLs from 17,380 domains, comparing cited and uncited pages on the same site across ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

These are correlations in one region and one quarter, and the study left out Perplexity, Claude and Gemini chat. Add markup that matches what the page says: Organization on your home page, Product on product pages, FAQPage where the questions are real.

07How should I write pages for AI answers?

Answer the question in the first lines, under a heading that uses the customer's words, then give the detail. SEO vendors recommend it and SISTRIX found structure goes with citations, but it's advice and not a proven lever: Google says you don't need to chunk content or rewrite it for AI.

What Google does stress is content that isn't commodity. Its guide says unique, useful content will likely influence presence in AI search more than anything else it suggests, and that a first-hand review offers more than a summary of what's already online. For a business, that means real prices, policies, specifications, service areas, case studies and your own numbers. Keep your Google Business Profile current if you have one.

08How do I get mentioned in ChatGPT?

Be discussed on sites other than your own. Ahrefs correlated 75,000 brands' metrics with their mentions in ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews (December 2025):

YouTube mentions correlated most strongly, at about 0.737 across the three. Ahrefs says correlation isn't causation, and its sample is domains with a Domain Rating above 40, so a small business may see something different.

Peec AI counted 30 million sources cited in US answers. Its top ten domains were Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Forbes, G2, Yelp, Facebook, Medium and TechRadar.

So the honest work is ordinary reputation work: ask real customers for reviews on the sites your category uses, keep your listings on those sites accurate, explain your product on YouTube, take part in forums as yourself, and get covered by trade press. Google warns that seeking inauthentic mentions isn't as helpful as it might seem, because its generative features rest on the same quality and spam systems as Search.

09Can I rank on ChatGPT or get recommended by it?

No one can promise it. OpenAI says placement isn't guaranteed, and Google says indexing and serving aren't guaranteed even when a page meets every requirement. Be wary of anyone selling a guaranteed recommendation; Google's guide warns about tools that promise ranking success or claim access to its internal metrics.

10Does llms.txt work?

The evidence so far says it doesn't move citations.

• llmstxt.org describes it as a proposal, and doesn't name an AI engine or model that reads it when answering.
• Google's guide says Google Search ignores these files, so they neither help nor harm you there, and that keeping one for other services is fine.
• SE Ranking checked nearly 300,000 domains, found the file on 10.13% and found no link to citation frequency.
• SISTRIX found 11.7% of cited URLs came from domains with an llms.txt, against 14.0% of all domains, and calls the effect unmeasurable.
• Chrome's Lighthouse has an experimental audit for the file, in a category Search Engine Journal reports isn't presented as a ranking factor.

Do the crawler and content work first.

11How do I measure AEO?

• Google: the Generative AI performance report in Search Console, available to all sites since 31 August 2026. It reports impressions in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's generative features, by page, country, device and date.
• Copilot and Bing: AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, a public preview. It shows total citations, cited pages, grounding queries (a sample) and citations per page.
• ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity: the crawler and help pages cited here describe no equivalent report. Watch your analytics for referrals from their domains, and your server logs for their crawlers.
• By hand: keep a list of 10 to 20 questions customers ask, and ask them monthly. Use a signed-out browser or a clean account. On 5 November 2026, ChatGPT answered a general AEO question in a signed-in temporary chat by naming a business from that account's history.

12How do I check whether AI tools can read my site?

The free AI readiness scan checks one public page, with no account. It reads the page's HTML without running JavaScript, along with robots.txt, sitemap.xml and up to 3 more pages from the same site.

• Search crawlers: your rules are tested against Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User and Applebot. Blocking any of them lowers the score.
• Training crawlers: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, CCBot and meta-externalagent are shown but not scored.
• Unreadable pages: if AI tools can't read the main text, the score is capped at 59.
• Structured data: missing markup doesn't count against you. Broken markup does, and so do prices or names that don't match the page.
• llms.txt: looked for, never scored.

A separate, optional Agent standards score covers agent-specific files such as Markdown for agents, Content Signals and MCP server cards.

The scan reads rules and HTML. It doesn't ask any assistant about you, so it can't say whether you'll be cited. It also can't see a firewall that blocks a crawler, and its JavaScript check is inferred from the HTML rather than a browser run.

13Where does AEO stop and an app start?

AEO works from public pages, so it can get a business named in an answer. It can't show a customer their own order or book them a slot, because that needs their account.

An app listed in ChatGPT's and Claude's directories does that: the customer connects it, signs in with their usual login, and asks about their order status or makes a booking. It needs an MCP server and a review, and OpenAI and Anthropic decide what gets listed. Transica builds and hosts these apps, or does the listing for you.

AEO doesn't depend on an app, and a business can do it alone.

15Common questions