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By Updated 7 min read AI & GEO

How to make ChatGPT recommend your brand

White humanoid robot with large eyes holding a tablet

Why it matters to appear in ChatGPT

According to OpenAI, ChatGPT had 700 million weekly active users in September 2025. When one of them asks "what's the best SEO agency in Barcelona?" or "which tool should I use to monitor my brand in AI?", the answer may name your brand, or it may not.

Next to "am I on the first page of Google?" there's now a second question: "does ChatGPT recommend me?" What ChatGPT is, how it works and where its sources come from is covered in our ChatGPT guide. The work of getting into these answers is called Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).

How a brand gets into a ChatGPT answer

OpenAI describes two routes separately. The first is training: its GPTBot crawler collects content that may be used to train its models. What the model learned that way is what it knows about your brand without looking anything up.

The second is search. According to OpenAI's help pages, ChatGPT may search the web automatically when a question would benefit from current information, and its answer then includes citations to its sources. To do this it sometimes works with other search providers, sending them a rewritten version of the question. OpenAI adds that the user's approximate location and, if memory is on, saved information can influence the results.

In the pages we read, OpenAI doesn't publish a list of factors that decide which brand gets named. What follows is what is documented and, where we say so, our own judgement.

What's documented and what's judgement

  • Crawler access: for a site to appear in answers that use search, OpenAI asks site owners not to block OAI-SearchBot. A site that blocks it isn't shown in those answers, except as a navigational link.
  • Structured data: Google uses the structured data it finds to understand a page's content. For AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimisations: SEO best practice still applies. Adding Schema for your organisation helps Google. Whether ChatGPT uses it, OpenAI doesn't say.
  • Helpful content: Google announced its helpful content system in 2022 to show original content written for people rather than mainly to attract search traffic. Since March 2024 it has been part of Google's core ranking systems.
  • E-E-A-T: a concept from Google's guidelines for its quality raters. How to show it on your site is covered in how to show E-E-A-T. We haven't read any OpenAI documentation that uses it.
  • A consistent message: your website, your profiles and the directories you're listed in should all say the same thing about what you do. That's our judgement: if sources contradict each other, an answer can pick up either version.

Practical strategies to appear in ChatGPT

1. Get your brand's description right on Google

According to Google, knowledge panels are generated automatically from sources across the web and, in some cases, from data partners. If your company already has one, you can claim it and suggest changes. Our glossary explains what a Google knowledge panel is. We haven't seen it documented that a panel makes a brand more likely to appear in ChatGPT.

What you can do today: complete your Google Business Profile with opening hours, services, photos and an accurate description, and ask your customers for reviews.

2. Publish content that can be quoted

A figure with a source and a date can be quoted; "traffic improved significantly" can't. This is our judgement: write concrete data, clear definitions, and lists or tables where the content calls for them. For example, instead of a long paragraph: "According to our [year] study, the top 3 barriers to [topic] are: 1) [barrier] ([X]%), 2) [barrier] ([Y]%), 3) [barrier] ([Z]%)."

3. See which sources ChatGPT cites in your industry

When ChatGPT searches the web, the answer may include citations, and "Sources" lists the cited pages and other links. Ask the questions your customers ask and note which sites come up: media, directories, forums or comparison sites. That's where your brand should be, with a complete, up-to-date profile.

4. Let AI crawlers in

OpenAI uses three separate agents. OAI-SearchBot is for ChatGPT's search. GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train its models, and blocking it signals that you don't want your content used for that. ChatGPT-User may visit a page when a user asks ChatGPT something in a conversation. Each setting is independent of the others, so check in your robots.txt what you allow each of them to do.

Google-Extended isn't a separate crawler. It's a robots.txt token that lets you decide whether content Google crawls may be used to train Gemini models and to ground their answers. Google says it doesn't affect inclusion in Search and isn't a ranking signal.

llms.txt is a proposal Jeremy Howard published on llmstxt.org on 3 September 2024: a Markdown file in the site root with brief information and links to the pages most useful to a model. It isn't a directives format like robots.txt, so Allow or Disallow lines have no function in it. To ask that your content not be used for training, OpenAI and Google document another route: blocking GPTBot or Google-Extended in robots.txt.

5. Measure your AI visibility

To know whether ChatGPT names your brand, you have to ask it, and keep asking. Our AI Visibility Tracker asks ChatGPT and other AI assistants, through their programming interfaces, real buying and search questions from the point of view of a customer profile. It records whether your brand appears, its position, whether your site is linked, which competitors come up and the tone used about you. The measurement runs without web search: it shows what the model recommends from what it already knows, not what each user sees in the app. Answers vary from one request to the next, so a single value is a sample and a trend over several weeks is more reliable.

6. Measure the visits that come from ChatGPT

Standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing data on 1 July 2023, and measurement now runs in Google Analytics 4. According to OpenAI, ChatGPT adds the parameter utm_source=chatgpt.com to links in its search results, so you can separate those visits by source in GA4. What you won't see there are the answers that name your brand without anyone clicking.

What NOT to do

  • AI content spam: Google's spam policies class generating many pages for the primary purpose of manipulating rankings, rather than helping users, as scaled content abuse, no matter how the content is created.
  • Keyword stuffing: Google treats it as spam: filling a page with keywords or numbers unnaturally or out of context. OpenAI doesn't document repeating phrases as a way to appear in ChatGPT.
  • Buying mentions: for Google, buying or selling links for ranking purposes is link spam. Whether a paid mention influences ChatGPT, OpenAI doesn't say.

SEO and GEO: what Google says

Google says SEO best practice still applies to its AI features, and that AI Overviews and AI Mode need no special optimisation. For ChatGPT, two things that OpenAI does document come on top: access for OAI-SearchBot, and the sources that ChatGPT's search cites.

Do you want to know if ChatGPT recommends your brand? Get in touch and we'll show you how the AI models we measure talk about your company.

If you'd rather not do this yourself, our page on ChatGPT SEO services explains how we do it and what we do and don't measure.

Sources

Accessed 11 November 2026.

How this article was made

The previous version included claims without sources, for example that a knowledge panel makes a brand more likely to appear in ChatGPT, that models apply E-E-A-T or detect paid mentions, and two case examples without verifiable data. Those statements are gone. This text was rewritten in November 2026 with AI assistance, from the pages linked above, and reviewed before publication. We haven't run our own experiment on what makes ChatGPT name a brand.

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Manuel Riveiro

CEO & Digital Strategist — ZDS

20+ years of experience in SEO, performance marketing and AI tools. Founder of ZDS and B2 Performance, based in Barcelona and Herdecke.

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