How to give ChatGPT and other AI assistants
the facts about your business
Nobody can promise that an assistant will mention you. What you can do is make the facts about your business easy for any machine to reach, read and trust. Here is how.
Start with the honest part
Anyone who promises to "get you into ChatGPT" is guessing. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and the others do not publish exactly how their assistants choose sources. The methods differ between assistants, and they change.
What you control is narrower, and still worth doing. You can make sure the facts are there to be found: what you do, where, what it costs or how to get a price, when you are open, and how to get in touch. If an assistant does look at your business, it then has the right facts to work from.
What OpenAI does say
A little is public. OpenAI says any public website can appear in ChatGPT search. It also says that sites which block its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as plain links.
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT search, it said the feature uses third-party search providers as well as content from partners. So being easy for ordinary search engines to read matters here too.
OpenAI's publisher FAQ also says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends people to. That means you can see those visits in your own website analytics. Real numbers from your own site beat anyone's guess.
Step 1: let the right visitors in
Check your robots.txt file at yourbusiness.com/robots.txt. AI companies now split their visitors by job.
- Search crawlers build the index an assistant answers from. Examples: OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot.
- User fetchers visit a page when a person asks. Examples: ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User.
- Training crawlers collect pages that may be used to train models. Examples: GPTBot and ClaudeBot.
If you want assistants to be able to read your site, do not block the search crawlers or user fetchers. You can still block training if you prefer. These are separate choices. See OAI-SearchBot vs GPTBot vs ChatGPT-User.
Then check your host. Many hosts and CDNs have settings that block AI crawlers before robots.txt is even read. If your site uses Cloudflare, see how to check Cloudflare's AI bot settings.
The free AI crawler checker shows what your robots.txt says to 14 AI crawlers, name by name.
Step 2: put the facts in the page text
Many automated visitors read the code your server sends and do not run JavaScript. If your prices or hours only appear after a script runs, or only inside an image or a PDF, some tools will never see them.
Make sure these are written as plain text on your site, ideally on your homepage or one click from it.
- What you do, in one plain sentence near the top.
- Where you are, or which areas you serve.
- Opening hours, including how you handle holidays.
- Prices, price ranges, or how to get a quote.
- Phone number, email address and a contact page.
- How to buy, book or ask for a quote.
A quick test: open your homepage, right-click and choose View page source. Search for your phone number and your opening hours. If they are not in the source, a tool that does not run JavaScript cannot see them.
Step 3: add structured data
Structured data is a short block of code that states your facts in a standard format called schema.org. People never see it. Machines can read it directly instead of guessing from your page text. For a local business it covers your name, address, phone number, opening hours and website.
We do not know exactly which assistants read structured data, or how much weight they give it. Search engines do read it, and it costs little to add. Our guide Structured data for small businesses has a template you can copy.
Step 4: keep your details the same everywhere
Your business appears in more places than your own site: maps listings, directories, review sites and social profiles. If your phone number or address differs between them, it is harder for any system to be sure which one is right.
- Pick one form of your business name and use it everywhere.
- Update your maps listings when your hours change.
- Correct or remove old listings at former addresses.
- Make sure your website shows the same details as your listings.
Step 5: make each page say what it is
Clear page titles and headings help people and machines alike. "Services" says less than "Boiler servicing in Leeds". A page for each main service or product, with its own facts, gives a tool something specific to read.
A sitemap at yourbusiness.com/sitemap.xml lists your pages, so pages beyond your homepage can be found.
What not to spend money on
- Promises of guaranteed mentions or rankings in ChatGPT or any other assistant. Nobody can make them honestly.
- Hidden text or pages written only for machines. They can mislead people, and Google's spam policies count text hidden to fool search engines as spam.
- llms.txt as a fix on its own. It is optional, and you can write one yourself in minutes. See Is llms.txt worth it in 2026?
Check your homepage
SiteCheck checks what AI agents are known to rely on, from your homepage code, robots.txt, llms.txt and sitemap. It also has an AI model (Meta's Llama, run by Cloudflare) answer customer questions from your homepage text, so you can see which facts are missing. It does not test ChatGPT or any other assistant, and it cannot tell you how they will behave.
Written with AI. OpenAI's statements were checked against its published documentation in October 2026.