How to get your business cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity

How to get your business cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity

ChatGPT and Perplexity search the web before they answer most buying questions, then name a few businesses and link the pages they used. To be among them, let their search crawlers read your site, put the facts a buyer asks for on your own pages, get listed and reviewed on the sites they read for your trade, and check what they answer every month.

Two results are worth counting apart:

An answer can name you and link a directory, or link your guide and name a competitor. Both are worth having; only being named puts you on the customer's shortlist.

The five steps, in order:

1. Check what they say about you now.
2. Let their search crawlers in.
3. Get onto the sites they read for your trade.
4. Put the facts buyers ask for on your own pages.
5. Measure every month.

How ChatGPT and Perplexity find the businesses they cite

Both work like a fast researcher. Their help pages describe the differences that matter to a business:

Two things follow. A customer in Leeds and one in London get different lists for the same question, so test from your own area. And ChatGPT says memory can shape the searches it writes, so a signed-in customer may see a different answer from yours.

Each answer can rest on several searches. In the AIGROW AI Source Map for October 2026, ChatGPT ran 3.4 searches per answer to questions about plumbers, and Claude 1.9. Each search returns its own pages, so the more of those results mention you, the more chances you have to be named.

Step 1: check what they say about you now

Write five questions a new customer would ask, without your business name, such as "Who is a good electrician in Leeds for rewiring an old house?" Ask each in ChatGPT and in Perplexity, signed out, from your own area. For every answer note whether you were named, in what place, which sites were cited, and who was named instead.

Ask each question three times. Answers move between runs: in the AIGROW Index, a rerun of the same question repeated 56% of the businesses named, on average. In the October 2026 study, ChatGPT and Claude, both searching the web, named no business in common on 64.4% of 472 local pages.

One screenshot proves little either way.

The free AI visibility checker puts two buyer questions for your trade and city to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok and shows every answer word for word. It asks without web search, so it shows what the models already know about you; your own searches in the apps show what they find today. Perplexity is not one of the assistants AIGROW's free checks ask, so test it by hand.

Worked example (invented numbers). An electrician in Leeds asks five questions three times each in ChatGPT and in Perplexity: 30 answers. It is named in 4 (13%, 95% interval 5% to 30%), and its own site is cited once. Checkatrade is cited in 9 answers and Trustpilot in 6, and the electrician has a profile on neither.

That points to step 3 before anything else.

Step 2: let their search crawlers in

ChatGPT finds pages for its search answers with OAI-SearchBot, and Perplexity with PerplexityBot. OpenAI says a site that blocks OAI-SearchBot is not shown in ChatGPT search answers, apart from navigational links. Perplexity says PerplexityBot is the crawler that surfaces and links websites in its results, and asks sites that want to appear to allow it.

Check three things:

1. Your robots.txt does not block OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot by name, or every crawler with "Disallow: /" under "User-agent: *".
2. Your firewall or CDN does not block them either. Both companies publish their IP ranges, and Perplexity suggests allow rules in services such as Cloudflare and AWS that match the user agent and those ranges together.
3. Training is a separate choice. OpenAI's GPTBot collects content for training and is set independently of OAI-SearchBot, and Perplexity says PerplexityBot is not used to train foundation models. You can refuse training and still appear in search.

OpenAI says a robots.txt change reaches its systems in about 24 hours, and Perplexity says up to 24 hours. The AI search optimization guide has the full crawler table for Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, with a sample robots.txt.

Step 3: get onto the sites they read for your trade

For a local business, the pages assistants cite to name someone are mostly review sites, directories and guides. For software, they are mostly the vendors' own sites. The AIGROW AI Source Map recorded this for ChatGPT and Claude answers with web search in October 2026:

A site is read when one of its pages was among those searched or cited for the answer, and cited when the answer gave one of its pages as the source for a name. The software rows rest on 20 answers each, so treat them as a direction.

What to do with it:

• Open the page for your trade and pick the sites that fit you: a listing, a review profile, a guide or a professional ranking.
• Claim or complete your profile there, with the same name, address, phone number and services as on your website.
• Ask recent customers for an honest review on the sites your trade's answers read.
• Look for local press, trade associations and suppliers' partner pages that can name you.
• If you sell software, your own pages carry more of the weight: a clear pricing page, a features page, and plain comparisons with the alternatives.

Step 4: put the facts buyers ask for on your own pages

When an assistant reads your site, it needs specific facts it can quote. Give each service one page that says in its first lines what you do, for whom, where, at what price or price range, how soon, and how to book. Then answer the questions customers ask you on the phone, one per heading.

Length does not decide this. Google's guidance on helpful content asks whether you write to a particular word count because you heard Google prefers one, and answers that it does not. Stop when the question is answered.

To become a source that others cite, publish something only you have: prices from your own jobs, a count of the work you did last year, or a plain guide to a local rule your customers ask about. The GEO guide shows a before-and-after rewrite of a service page and what research found about the content AI engines quote.

Want to know where your business stands? The free checker shows whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok name it.

If you sell products: ChatGPT shopping

ChatGPT shows products with images, prices and key details when people shop. OpenAI's merchant page says:

• Merchants share a product feed so their products can appear in shopping results.
• If you sell through Shopify or Etsy, your catalog is already integrated, with no further setup or application.
• Other merchants apply to share their feed, and applicants join a waitlist.
• Richer data, such as images, prices and reviews, helps products appear with more accurate information.
• Purchases are completed on the merchant's own site or app, with no fees for purchases made there.
• Shopping is live for ChatGPT users in the United States, with more regions planned.

If you sell outside the United States, the steps above for your website and listings still apply.

Step 5: measure every month

Rerun the same questions with the same settings once a month and keep three numbers: answers that name you, answers that cite one of your pages, and visits. For visits, look for referrals from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai in your analytics. Add a "how did you hear about us" question to your forms and calls too, because many people who read an answer phone you or search your name instead of clicking.

Back to the electrician. It claims its Checkatrade and Trustpilot profiles, asks its last 20 customers for a review, and adds a page for each service with its area and call-out charge. Three months later the same 30 questions name it in 12 answers (40%, interval 25% to 58%), and its own pages are cited in 5.

The two intervals still overlap, so it keeps checking before it calls this a gain. The AI visibility metrics guide shows how to pool months, and the small business AI visibility plan sets out the monthly routine.

How long it takes depends on more than you. A robots.txt change is read within a day, but new reviews, listings and pages first have to turn up in the searches the assistants run. Nobody can promise when, or whether, an assistant will name you.

Doing it yourself, or getting help

An owner can do every step above in a few hours a month. If you want help, choose the part you hand over:

The page on ways to get recommended by ChatGPT compares AIGROW's options. Before you hire anyone, ask which assistants they check, how many times each question is asked, whether you will see every full answer, and what they will fix first. The AEO strategy guide has the full list of questions.

Anyone who guarantees a ChatGPT mention is promising something nobody controls.

Sources

Official pages read on 20 October 2026:

• OpenAI Help Center: Searching the web with ChatGPT
• OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers
• ChatGPT: Power product discovery in ChatGPT
• Perplexity Help Center: How does Perplexity work?
• Perplexity: Perplexity crawlers
• Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content

AIGROW data:

• AI Source Map, October 2026, with one page per trade
• AI Visibility Report, October 2026 edition
• AI recommendations study, 2026

The worked example uses invented numbers. Every interval in it is a 95% Wilson interval.