How to get recommended by ChatGPT, in practice.
Not a list of tricks. What the answer is actually built from, what you can change this month, and what nobody can promise you.
An AI answer is assembled from pages it can read, and from what other sites say about you.
Both halves matter. Most companies only work on the first half, their own website, and then wonder why they are still not named.
- It has to be able to read youNot blocked by robots.txt, not hidden behind JavaScript, and stating your facts in plain sentences rather than only in images or PDFs.
- Your facts have to agree with themselvesThe name, the address, what you sell and who you serve should read the same on your site, your registration, your LinkedIn page and every directory that lists you.
- Someone else has to have written about youA model repeats names it has seen in more than one place. Your own homepage, alone, is one place.
- You have to ask the same question repeatedlyAnswers change between runs and between accounts. A single screenshot proves nothing, in either direction.
Six things, roughly in the order they are worth fixing.
1. A one-sentence description that survives being copied
If someone asked what the company does and you had one sentence, no adjectives allowed, what would it be? Write that sentence on the homepage, the about page and in the footer, worded identically. Models quote short, self-contained sentences. "We help businesses grow" gives them nothing to quote; "We measure what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google say about a Singapore company, correct the facts at the source, and re-test monthly" can be lifted as-is.
2. One page per question a buyer actually asks
An answer engine picks the page that matches the question. If your whole site is one long brochure, there is no page for "how much does it cost", "how long does it take" or "is it different from SEO". Each of those deserves a page. Short is fine: specific matters more than long.
3. Facts a machine can check
Legal name, registration number, registered address, opening hours, prices if you publish them, and who is accountable. Put them in the text and in structured data. This is the part most agencies skip, and it decides whether you are described correctly. Being described wrongly is worse than being left out: the error is repeated with confidence.
4. Third-party mentions that are not your own writing
Directories, trade associations, supplier pages, partner sites, industry round-ups, one well-argued guest piece. A single mention inside a list the model already trusts beats fifty pages on your own domain. It is also the slowest part, and the part you cannot fake.
5. Freshness where it matters, not everywhere
Changing the year in the footer does nothing. Publishing a real reading with this month's numbers, and leaving the old ones online, gives an engine a reason to come back and something new to cite. Our own monthly reading lives at research for exactly that reason.
6. Being askable in the first place
If robots.txt blocks AI crawlers, you removed yourself from the shortlist before the question was asked. Open the file and read it, rather than trusting what the CMS says.
What can be measured, and what cannot be promised.
We publish counts, not percentages, until there are enough comparable months for a percentage to mean something.
What you can measure
Whether your company is named at all, in which position, in which wording, on which engine, on which date, for a fixed set of questions. Keep every answer word for word so next month can be compared against it. Add the number of enquiries where the buyer says they came from an assistant.
What nobody can promise
That a specific answer will name you. Answer engines decide what they show, and the same question returns different results for different people. Anyone selling a guaranteed citation is selling something they do not control. Our own reading, 12 enquiries between August and October 2026 with 3 of which the buyer said came through an AI assistant, is a count from our own inbox, labelled as our own company. Not a client result, and not a conversion rate.
A four-week sequence that costs nothing but attention.
- Week 1, record the baselineWrite down ten questions a real buyer would ask. Ask them on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google. Save the answers as text, with the date. Do not fix anything yet.
- Week 2, fix the recordCompare your site, your registration, your Google Business Profile and every directory listing. Wherever the facts disagree, correct them. Unglamorous, and it moves more than new copy does.
- Week 3, one page per questionPick the three questions where you were absent or described wrongly. Write one page each, factual, with the answer in the first two sentences.
- Week 4, ask to be includedFind the round-ups and directories your buyers already read, and ask to be listed with correct details. One acceptance beats ten cold emails.
Then repeat the baseline on the first of every month. If you skip the re-test, you are only guessing.
Four straight answers.
Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?
Not inside the answer. There is no ad slot in an organic reply. You can pay a publication for a placement in their list, which is advertising and should be labelled as such, and it is not the same as being recommended because the model found you in several places.
How long does it take to show up?
Three clocks run at once. Crawling and indexing takes days to a few weeks. Third-party mentions take weeks to months, because other people have to agree. The model's own picture updates on its own schedule, which nobody outside the vendor can see. Anyone quoting a fixed number of weeks is guessing.
Is this just SEO with a new name?
It shares the foundation: a crawlable site, clear structure, real facts. It differs in the target. SEO competes for a position in a list of links; GEO competes to be the name inside a written answer, which is decided partly by sources you do not own.
Do I need to rebuild my website?
Usually not. In most audits the problem is not the design but inconsistent facts, too few pages, or blocked crawlers. Rebuilding before fixing those spends money on the wrong thing.
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