How to get your business mentioned in ChatGPT.

First, define what “mentioned” means.

An answer can name your brand without linking to you. It can cite a page without recommending your service. A visitor can follow a citation and still decide not to enquire. These are different events and need different measurements.

Choose the task you care about. For a service business it might be appearing as a relevant option for a buyer, having an accurate description and giving that buyer a useful route to the site. A branded question such as “what is BeeCited?” is a different test from “who can optimize my website for AI search?”

Do not combine search-enabled answers and answers generated without a web search into one visibility score. Record the mode, because the sources and freshness can differ.

1. Check the right access.

OpenAI identifies OAI-SearchBot as its search crawler and GPTBot as a separate training crawler. These controls serve different purposes.

Ask a developer to check the site’s robots rules, HTTP responses and host protection for legitimate search access. A normal browser visit is not enough to rule out a crawler-specific block. Keep the evidence: requested URL, status, relevant headers and server or firewall observations.

Allowing a crawler is an access decision, not an endorsement or a promise of inclusion. Make the training decision separately.

OpenAI: Overview of crawlers

2. Make the offer easy to evaluate.

Give each distinct service a clear page. State what it does, who it fits, what the customer receives and what is outside the scope. If geography, language or a minimum project size matters, say so.

Use the words a customer would use. A page labelled “solutions” with three vague sentences is much less informative than a specific service description. Keep the important facts in readable page content, not only in an image, animation or downloadable pitch deck.

A practical check: ask someone unfamiliar with the company to read a service page and tell you what they could buy. If they cannot answer, the page needs work before it needs more promotion.

3. Correct the information around the brand.

List the places that describe the business: the website, relevant social profiles, business directories, partner pages and, where applicable, Google Business Profile. Compare the name, description, services, location and destination links.

Fix contradictions and outdated descriptions. Keep real distinctions where they matter; “consistent” does not mean publishing the same promotional paragraph everywhere.

A simple change log helps: which profile was wrong, what was changed and when it was checked. This is more actionable than counting profiles without assessing their accuracy.

4. Create reasons for independent sources to mention you.

A brand can describe itself. Independent sources can provide another perspective. Look for opportunities that make sense in the industry: useful research, a genuinely informed contribution, a documented collaboration or a legitimate business listing.

Prioritize relevance and factual accuracy over a raw count of mentions. Paid placements should be handled transparently. Mass-produced directory entries and fabricated reviews do not become good evidence because they mention the brand.

If you do not yet have results to publish, explain your method honestly. Do not make a case study out of a demonstration or invent a client to fill an empty page.

5. Repeat a small, useful test.

Create a fixed group of buying questions for the market and language you care about. Save the exact questions, date, product mode and original answers. Repeat the test under comparable conditions and record whether the brand is named, whether a page is cited and whether the description is accurate.

Illustrative example: a bilingual web studio might track questions about building a multilingual company site, maintaining an existing site and improving search access. It should not treat all three as interchangeable “AI visibility.”

Keep the question set stable long enough to compare periods. If you add questions, show the old and expanded set separately. Otherwise, a changed sample can look like growth.

What to do this week.

You will leave with a better starting point and a manageable work list. That is more useful than a promise that a platform will recommend you after a fixed number of days.

• Choose a few questions connected to real buying decisions.
• Save answers and inspect the sources they use.
• Confirm search access with a technical check.
• Rewrite one unclear service page.
• Correct the most important conflicting brand facts.
• Set a date to repeat the same checks.