How do I get my website recommended by ChatGPT?

ChatGPT recommends businesses it can understand, verify and retrieve. To be recommended, you need three things: pages that directly answer the questions your customers ask, a site that is technically readable by AI systems, and presence on the sources those systems already trust. None of this is secret and none of it requires tricks. Most businesses simply have not done it.

Answer the questions your buyers actually ask

When someone asks an assistant “what is the best accountant for freelancers?” or “how do I fix a damp wall?”, the answer is assembled from pages that address that question plainly. A homepage full of slogans gives a model nothing to work with. A page whose heading is the question, with a direct answer in the first paragraph, gives it everything.

Write down the ten questions a customer would ask an assistant just before choosing someone like you. Category questions (“best X for Y”), problem questions (“how do I…”), and comparison questions (“X or Y?”). Publish one page per question on your own site. Answer in the first paragraph, then earn the rest of the page with detail. This is unglamorous work, which is exactly why it still wins.

Make the site readable to machines

Assistants read your site the way a fast, literal-minded visitor would. Three mechanical checks matter:

• Text the crawler can extract. If your content only exists inside JavaScript rendering or images, some AI crawlers see a nearly empty page. View your site with JavaScript disabled; what remains is roughly what some systems read.
• Structured data. JSON-LD markup (Organization, FAQPage, Product) states plainly who you are and what you sell, in a format built for machines.
• Do not block the crawlers. Check your robots.txt for rules that block GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot. Some sites blocked AI crawlers in 2023 on principle and forgot; those sites cannot be recommended by systems that cannot read them.

Be present where the assistants look

Search-connected assistants cite sources: review sites, comparison articles, community threads, industry directories. If those sources do not mention you, the assistant has no independent evidence you exist. Find out which specific pages get cited when your buyers’ questions are asked, then earn a mention there or publish something better on your own domain.

Measure before and after

You cannot manage what you have not measured. Ask the assistants your buyers’ questions and record whether you appear, how you are described, and who is recommended instead. Do it again after you publish. Answers vary between runs, so look for the trend, not a single result.

We built Sourcive to do this measurement properly: it asks the real model APIs the questions your buyers ask, shows exactly where you appear and where competitors do, and generates the files and page list to fix what it finds.