How to rank in ChatGPT: getting your firm recommended, not just mentioned

To rank in ChatGPT, three things have to be true. OpenAI's search crawler must be able to read your site, your pages must answer the exact questions buyers ask in plain, quotable sentences, and other sites ChatGPT trusts must say the same things about you. There is no paid route in and no single trick. ChatGPT recommends the firms it can find, understand and check.

I get asked this question most weeks now, usually by a partner who typed "best [their service] firm in [their city]" into ChatGPT and did not see their own name. This post is the answer I give them, written for professional services firms rather than software companies.

How does ChatGPT decide which firms to recommend?

When a question needs current information, ChatGPT runs a web search, reads a handful of pages and writes an answer with citations. OpenAI's own help page on ChatGPT search says it may rewrite your question before searching, and that it "sometimes partners with other search providers", naming Microsoft among them.

That rewrite matters. A buyer types "who should I use for a shareholder dispute in Manchester?" and the model searches for something closer to "shareholder dispute solicitors Manchester". So the pages that feed the answer are, in large part, the pages that already rank well for the plain version of the question in a conventional search index.

On top of that, the model weighs what it has read across the wider web. If three directories, a trade body page and a local news story all describe you as a specialist in something, that is a stronger signal than your own homepage saying so.

There is also a lot of randomness. Ahrefs asked ChatGPT the same questions repeatedly and reported less than a 1 in 100 chance of getting the same list of brands twice. So "ranking" in ChatGPT is really about how often you appear across many phrasings of a question, not a fixed position.

Can ChatGPT actually see your website?

Check this first, because it is the one thing you fully control.

OpenAI runs separate crawlers. Its crawler documentation says OAI-SearchBot "is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features", and that sites opted out of it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links". GPTBot is a different crawler used for model training. You can block GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot.

I have seen firms block both by accident, usually through a security plugin or a blanket "block AI bots" setting added by a web developer. Open your robots.txt file (yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and look for either name.

Two other quick checks:

• Is your key content in the HTML? If your service pages load their text through heavy JavaScript, some crawlers will see an empty page. View the page source and search for a sentence from the page.
• Are you in Bing? Given the Microsoft partnership mentioned above, it is worth verifying your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submitting your sitemap. Many firms have never logged in.

What should your pages say so ChatGPT can quote them?

The best evidence we have on this comes from the research paper that coined the term GEO. Aggarwal and colleagues, in a paper accepted at KDD 2024, tested changes to web pages and measured how visible those pages became inside AI-generated answers. Adding citations to sources, adding quotations and adding statistics were the three strongest methods, each improving their main visibility measure by roughly 27% in their tests. Keyword stuffing made things slightly worse.

For a law firm or an accountancy practice, that translates into some unglamorous rules:

1. Answer the question in the first two sentences. "Yes, a director can be personally liable for unpaid VAT in these circumstances..." rather than three paragraphs about your firm's values.
2. Use real numbers you can stand behind. Typical timescales, fixed stages, how many matters of that type you handle each year. If you do not know the number, find out before you publish it.
3. Name the people. Who does the work, what they are qualified in, how long they have done it. Google's own guidance on helpful content asks whether it is "self-evident to your visitors who authored your content", and AI answers borrow from the same pages.
4. One page per service, per question. A single "Services" page listing twelve things gives the model nothing specific to cite.
5. Cite your sources. Link to the legislation, the HMRC manual, the regulator's guidance. It helps readers and, per the research above, it helps visibility.

Where else does ChatGPT need to see your name?

This is the part most firms skip, and it is usually the reason a strong firm does not appear.

The model is looking for agreement. It trusts a claim more when independent sources repeat it. For professional services, the useful sources tend to be:

You do not need all of these. You need the descriptions to match. If your website says "commercial property specialists", your directory listing says "full-service firm" and your Google profile says "lawyer", the model has three different stories and no reason to pick yours.

From our work

When we reviewed a corporate and commercial firm in the South West in September 2026, Google was sending its main commercial search to the firm's commercial property page, not to the corporate work the partners actually wanted. Meanwhile one of the site's strongest pages was a case study that ranked for the name of a mini-golf course. Nothing on the site answered the question a business owner asks. That is the gap ChatGPT sees too: it cannot recommend you for work your own pages never describe.

What we'd do in your first 30 days

This is roughly the order we work in when a firm comes to us wanting to show up in ChatGPT answers. See how we approach ChatGPT SEO for the longer version.

Week 1: find out where you stand.

• Write down 20 questions a real buyer would ask before hiring you. Use your enquiry emails, not your imagination.
• Ask each one in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity. Record who is named and which pages are cited.
• Check robots.txt, page source and Bing indexing.

Week 2: fix the foundations.

• Allow OAI-SearchBot if it was blocked.
• Rewrite the opening of your top five service pages so the answer comes first.
• Add named authors and qualifications to each page.

Week 3: build the pages that are missing.

• For each of the 20 questions where a competitor was cited and you were not, look at the cited page. Write a better one: more specific, better sourced, clearly owned by a named person.

Week 4: fix what others say about you.

• Update directory and professional body listings so they use the same description as your site.
• Ask five recent clients for reviews that mention the specific service they bought.
• Re-run the 20 questions and record the change. Then keep running them monthly.

None of this is a trick. It is making your firm easier to find and easier to believe, which is what AI search optimisation comes down to.

Quick checklist

• OAI-SearchBot allowed in robots.txt
• Site verified in Bing Webmaster Tools
• Service page text visible in the HTML source
• Every service page opens with a direct answer
• Named author and credentials on every advice page
• Directory, professional body and Google listings describe you the same way
• A fixed list of buyer questions you re-test every month

FAQ

Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?

No. OpenAI's publisher FAQ describes appearing in ChatGPT search in terms of crawler access and content, and says nothing about paid placement. Anyone offering guaranteed placement should be asked to explain how.

Does an llms.txt file help?

Not much, for now. It is a proposed standard, and Google's John Mueller said in June 2025 that "no AI system currently uses llms.txt". It does no harm, but it will not fix a site that is blocked, thin or unsupported by other sources.

How long does it take to appear in ChatGPT answers?

Crawler and page fixes can show up within weeks, because ChatGPT searches the live web. Changing what other sites say about you takes longer, often months. I would not trust anyone who gives you a fixed date.

How do I know if ChatGPT is sending me enquiries?

OpenAI says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to referral links, so those visits show up in Google Analytics. Pair that with asking every new enquiry how they found you. We cover this in more detail in our piece on measuring AI search visibility.

Is this different from normal SEO?

It overlaps heavily. The pages that feed ChatGPT are often pages that already rank. The difference is the extra weight on being quotable and being confirmed by other sources. Our generative engine optimisation page sets out where the two diverge.

Want to know if ChatGPT recommends you?

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