How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and AI answers

To get your business recommended by ChatGPT and other AI assistants, you need three things in place: pages that answer real questions in a sentence or two, your site indexed in Bing and Brave, and business details that match everywhere they appear. None of it guarantees a mention, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. This is the checklist we follow, with what we have verified and what is only reported. It is the how-to companion to our earlier post on whether your business shows up in ChatGPT, which explains why this matters, so we will not repeat that here.

The terms, briefly

People search for this under several names: chatgpt search, generative engine optimisation (GEO) and answer engine optimisation (AEO). They describe nearly the same job, which is making your content easy for an AI system to find, understand and quote. In our work it overlaps heavily with ordinary SEO. There is no secret second discipline.

Step 1: write answer blocks

An answer block is a section built to make sense on its own. It has a heading close to the question people ask, a one or two sentence direct answer, then two or three lines of support. The claim and its evidence sit together, so if a system lifts only that chunk, it still stands up.

On our sites this is done through a faqs: list in the page's frontmatter, which renders a visible FAQ section and the matching structured data. Use real questions in natural language, such as "How much does a bathroom renovation cost in the Illawarra?", not keyword fragments.

We have measured this on Google, not on ChatGPT. The write-up is what we measured after adding answer blocks. We saw one page cited in a Google AI Overview after a block was added, and it was one observation, not a method. For ChatGPT we have no measurement, only the reasoning that clear, quotable text is easier to use.

Step 2: be in the Bing index

ChatGPT search is widely reported to use Bing results among its sources. That is reported, not verified by us, and OpenAI has not given a full account. We act on it anyway, because Bing indexing costs nothing and is useful by itself.

Our routine:

• verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools using the account-wide BingSiteAuth.xml file,
• submit the sitemap and check its last fetched date,
• send new pages in priority order within the daily quota, which is 100 a day on a young site like ours,
• check individual pages with the URL information check.

The details are in our Bing Webmaster Tools setup. We also ping IndexNow, covered in IndexNow explained.

A worked example from this week. We found two older posts that Bing listed as crawled with a size of zero, which would make them useless as sources. We resubmitted them on 13 October. The lesson is that "in the sitemap" and "usable in the index" are different things.

Step 3: be in the Brave index

Brave Search runs its own index, and some assistants are reported to use it as a source. Again, reported rather than verified by us. Brave has a submit URL form at search.brave.com/submit-url. It takes one address per submission, with a short human check, and then shows a thank you message. There is no sitemap upload and no API that we found.

So we submit the few pages that matter most: the home page, main services, pricing and the best guides. On 13 October we did seven key pages for pagecog.com.au. It is a slow job on purpose, so do not try to submit everything.

Step 4: keep your details identical

Name, phone, website and service areas should match on your site, your Google Business Profile and your Bing Places listing. See Bing Places for service area businesses. Assistants lean on third-party sources, and a business that appears the same way in several trusted places is easier to name with confidence.

Step 5: do not block yourself

Check that robots.txt is not blocking AI crawlers by accident and that the content appears in the page's HTML without needing scripts to run first. Our page on how we rank a site inside ChatGPT and the other assistants covers the technical checks.

What about llms.txt?

It is a proposed file that lists your key pages for AI tools. We have not measured any effect, and we explain why in llms.txt, what we know and do not know. Do not treat it as a shortcut.

How to check whether it is working

Ask the assistants the questions your customers would ask, in your city, and note whether you appear. Do it monthly, with the same wording, and write down the results. Answers vary between requests, so a single miss means little and a single hit means little. Look for a pattern over several months.

What nobody can promise

No agency, including us, can promise inclusion in an AI answer. The systems are not public, they change, and they are not consistent between asks. What you can control is whether your pages are clear, indexed and consistent. That work also helps Google and your human visitors, so it is rarely wasted.

If you would like this done for your site, our SEO service covers the setup and checks, you can see costs on the pricing page, and get started is the place to begin.