How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business?

For ClickForest I track fifty realistic questions every day, the kind Flemish SME owners ask ChatGPT. From “which marketing agency suits my SME” to “why isn’t my webshop converting”. What strikes me most: if you’re not in the answer, you don’t exist. There is no page two in ChatGPT, no position eleven to scroll to. The good news: those answers don’t come out of a black box. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews build their recommendations on sources you can influence. In this article I explain where those recommendations come from, how to measure where your business stands today and which steps demonstrably work. And just as importantly: which popular GEO advice you can safely ignore.

Where does ChatGPT get its recommendations?

ChatGPT combines two layers: the knowledge inside the model itself (training data) and, for current or commercial questions, live web results fetched by the OAI-SearchBot crawler. Both layers lean on external sources: editorial media, Wikipedia, review sites, forums and LinkedIn. If you appear in those sources, you stand a chance of a recommendation. If you don’t, you’re rarely mentioned spontaneously.

Which sources those are concretely was mapped by Peec AI in July 2026, based on 30 million cited sources: Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Forbes, G2, Yelp, Facebook, Medium and TechRadar make up the top ten across all major AI platforms (Peec AI). The mix differs per engine: ChatGPT leans on editorial sources like Wikipedia and Forbes, while Google AI Overviews and AI Mode draw more from YouTube, Facebook and Yelp.

One caveat up front: those rankings are a snapshot. Semrush analysed 230,000 prompts and over 100 million citations and saw Reddit drop from around 60% of ChatGPT answers to around 10% after an update in the second half of 2025 (Semrush). So don’t build on a single channel.

This discipline is called GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. ClickForest delivers GEO for Flemish SMEs in Mechelen and Antwerp as an extension of SEO, not a replacement for it. What GEO is exactly and how it grew out of SEO is covered in GEO marketing: the evolution of SEO. This article focuses on the practical question: how does your business end up in those answers?

Why is your business not found in AI search engines?

Almost always for one of three reasons: your business doesn’t appear in the external sources AI systems rely on, your website doesn’t answer the customer’s question literally enough to serve as a source, or a technical barrier keeps AI crawlers out. The first reason weighs heaviest in practice and is overlooked most often.

In the ClickForest AI tracker, which follows fifty realistic SME questions in ChatGPT every day, the pattern is consistent. For agency-search questions like “good Shopify developer in the Mechelen region”, ChatGPT names concrete companies, fed by listicles, directories and reviews. For problem questions like “my webshop isn’t converting”, it mainly cites guides and blog articles that explain the problem. To exist for both kinds of question, you need both: external mentions and content that answers the question.

Being cited is not the same as being named. An analysis by Semrush and Kevin Indig, covering nearly 4,000 domain appearances across 115 prompts, found that 61.7% of AI citations are ghost citations: your page appears as a source link under the answer, but your brand name is nowhere in the text. ChatGPT cites sources in 87% of answers, but names brands in only 20.7% of them (Semrush). We see the same in our own tracking: clickforest.com surfaces as a source link in well over half of the questions we follow, while the brand name is named in only a fraction of those. The lesson: write your brand name in the same paragraph as the fact that makes you citable.

Run a webshop? Then be sure to read how your webshop stays findable now that AI agents shop along.

How do you measure whether ChatGPT names your business today?

Measure before you optimise. Ask the questions your customers put to ChatGPT and Perplexity yourself, across several days, and note which companies and sources recur. Also check in GA4 how many visitors already arrive via chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai or gemini.google.com. Then you know whether your problem is visibility, or the conversion of AI visitors who already come.

A single test says little: AI answers vary by day and by phrasing, even for businesses that hold a strong position. So work with a fixed prompt list you repeat periodically: the questions your customers actually ask, in their words, including the problem variants.

A structured AI audit maps where you stand today across the SEO and GEO checkpoints that determine your visibility, from structured data to AI crawler access. If you also want to know what AI engines say about your brand today, where your competitors stand and which sources feed the answers, a GEO audit is the more thorough route.

Which content do AI search engines cite most?

Comparative and evaluative content wins. Listicles account for 21.9% of all AI citations, more than regular articles (16.7%) and product pages (13.7%). For commercial questions, the share of listicles even rises to 40.9%. And for questions about brands, 57% of citations go to reviews and social proof. Pages that answer one question completely and currently stand the best chance.

The figures come from two large analyses. Wix Studio examined 75,000 AI answers with over 1 million citations (Wix Studio); Omniscient Digital scrutinised 23,387 citations for brand-related questions and saw, next to the 57% for reviews and social proof, a mere 5.4% go to thought leadership (Omniscient Digital). Wix rightly adds nuance: the intent of the question drives the format. And another caveat: these citation studies are American or English-language, so read the percentages as direction, not law. But that direction is clear: AI engines look for comparison, evaluation and evidence, not brochures.

Freshness matters too. Ahrefs analysed almost 17 million cited URLs: AI assistants cite content that is on average 25.7% fresher than classic search results, and ChatGPT picks pages roughly 458 days newer than Google organic on average (Ahrefs). At the same time, the average cited page is still 2.9 years old. The practical conclusion: write evergreen, but maintain your best pages with real updates.

In practice that means: use the literal customer question as a heading, give the answer in the first sentences, back it up with figures and sources, and dare to compare. The full content framework is in GEO strategies: become the source for generative AI.

How important are mentions outside your own website?

For recommendation questions, more important than your own site. 57% of AI citations for brand evaluations come from reviews and social proof, and for professional and B2B questions LinkedIn is now the most-cited domain across six AI platforms. Reviews on Google and sector platforms, mentions in other people’s listicles and an active LinkedIn profile weigh more than yet another page on your own site.

That LinkedIn figure comes from an analysis of 1.4 million citations by Profound (November 2025 to February 2026): for professional questions, LinkedIn is the most-cited domain across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Copilot and Perplexity combined, and in ChatGPT it climbed from roughly position eleven to position five (Profound). So if you sell B2B and leave LinkedIn untouched, you leave AI visibility on the table too. How to tackle that channel structurally is covered in LinkedIn marketing for B2B leads.

Another telling detail from the Wix research: in professional services, 80.9% of cited listicles came from third parties, not from the companies themselves. AI engines trust what others write about you more than what you write about yourself. For a Flemish SME that concretely means: actively ask customers for Google reviews, make sure you’re in the relevant sector guides and directories, and build cases third parties can reference. ClickForest builds that external evidence layer systematically for Flemish SMEs in Mechelen and Antwerp, precisely because AI engines only recommend brands once others write about them.

What has to be technically right for AI crawlers?

Two things: your content must sit in the raw HTML and AI crawlers must be allowed in. None of the major AI crawlers executes JavaScript; only Gemini, via the Googlebot infrastructure, does render JavaScript. And whoever blocks OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt or a firewall does not, according to OpenAI itself, appear in ChatGPT’s search results.

The JavaScript finding comes from a measurement by Vercel and MERJ at the end of 2024, based on among others 569 million GPTBot visits per month: AI crawlers do fetch JavaScript files, but do not execute them (Vercel). That conclusion has not been publicly refuted since. If your price table, FAQ or service description only appears after JavaScript rendering, then it simply doesn’t exist for ChatGPT and Perplexity.

On the crawlers, OpenAI is explicit in its own documentation: OAI-SearchBot “is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features” (OpenAI). So check your robots.txt and your firewall or bot-management settings: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot must be allowed through.

Structured data remains hygiene here, not a miracle: it helps machines understand your business, services and authors unambiguously. How to set that up is in the structured data guide and the JSON-LD implementation guide. And the classic SEO foundation stays the bedrock: AI search features start from the same index and the same quality signals.

Do you need an llms.txt to be findable?

No. Ahrefs analysed 137,000 domains: 97% of sites with a valid llms.txt received zero AI requests on it in May 2026 (Ahrefs). Google clarified in June 2026 that you don’t need special AI files to appear in AI features. An llms.txt does no harm, but it’s the last thing you do, not the first.

Tellingly, adoption did grow by a factor of 8.8, from over 4,000 sites in June 2025 to over 36,000 in May 2026 (tracking by Originality.ai, via PPC Land). Many agencies sell the file as a GEO quick win, while the server logs show AI bots simply don’t request it. Google says it plainly in its own documentation: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features” (Google Search Central).

“AFAIK none of the AI services have said they’re using LLMs.TXT (and you can tell when you look at your server logs that they don’t even check for it). To me, it’s comparable to the keywords meta tag.”

— John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google (via Search Engine Journal)

Put the time you’d spend on this into content that answers customer questions and into external mentions. That’s where the return is.

Does optimising for Perplexity and AI Overviews differ from ChatGPT?

The foundation is identical, the accents differ. ChatGPT is by far the largest channel, with 76.87% of global AI referrals. Google AI Overviews already appeared on more than 12% of Belgian searches at the end of 2025 and lean more on YouTube and review platforms. Whoever sets the shared foundation, answering literal questions, building external mentions and serving accessible HTML, scores across every engine at once.

The referral shares come from Statcounter (June 2026) (Statcounter). The Belgian AI Overviews figures come from research by Online Marketing Monkey on over 8 million searches: from 3.37% of searches in May 2025, through a peak of 14.53% in August, to 12.21% in November 2025. At the same time, the share of citations for the studied Belgian sites fell from 2.43% to 1.98% (Online Marketing Monkey). More AI answers, fewer source slots: whoever moves early takes the slots that remain.

And your customers are already there: according to imec.digimeter, 43% of Flemish people used generative AI regularly in 2025, up from 28% in 2024 and 18% in 2023 (imec). The fewer people click through to classic search results, the more each AI mention weighs; why that is so is explained in the importance of zero-click.

What does a mention in ChatGPT concretely deliver?

Less volume than Google, higher purchase intent. AI traffic to US retail sites converted 54% better than other traffic in May 2026 and grew 138% year on year. Semrush calculated, within its own marketing niche, that an AI search visitor is worth 4.4 times as much as a classic organic visitor by conversion rate. So don’t count on spectacular traffic graphs, but on better leads.

The retail figures come from Adobe Analytics data over more than a trillion visits to US retail sites: AI traffic grew 1,324% since October 2024, and AI visitors stay 53% longer and view 23% more pages (Digital Commerce 360). The Semrush figure applies to its own digital-marketing niche and so cannot simply be extrapolated to every sector (Semrush). But the direction is the same across every dataset: a visitor who arrives via an AI recommendation has already half made their choice.

“Traffic—unless you’re a publisher who monetizes through advertising—is a vanity metric.”

— Rand Fishkin, cofounder and CEO of SparkToro (Advanced Web Ranking)

That’s exactly why ClickForest steers GEO projects not on traffic, but on mentions for the right questions and on the quality of the leads they produce.

Conclusion: measure first, then build

Here’s how I approach it, in this order:

1. Measure your current AI visibility. Test the real customer questions across several days in ChatGPT and Perplexity, and check your AI referrals in GA4.
2. Answer your customers’ literal questions. One question per page, the answer in the first sentences, figures with a source, your brand name in the same paragraph as the citable fact.
3. Build the external evidence layer. Google reviews, sector guides, third-party listicles, cases and a consistent LinkedIn presence.
4. Get the technical side right. Content in the raw HTML, AI crawlers allowed in, structured data as hygiene.
5. Keep going and refresh. AI cites fresher content, and the source mix shifts every quarter. GEO is a habit, not a one-off project.

“Play the long game. Sit back and see how things shake out before making dramatic changes.”

— Lily Ray, VP SEO Strategy at Amsive (BuzzStream)

That’s also my most honest advice: distrust anyone who promises you guaranteed ChatGPT positions. ClickForest delivers GEO for Flemish SMEs in Mechelen, Antwerp and the rest of Flanders, always starting from a measurement instead of a promise. Explore the GEO approach or book a video call if you want to know where your business stands in ChatGPT today.