How to get recommended by ChatGPT and AI search

How AI assistants decide what to recommend

AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI features recommend businesses based on what they can find, crawl, and trust across the web, not from a paid placement or a set of tricks applied once. That means the same fundamentals that help you rank in Google, being findable, being accurate, and being mentioned by others, are also what get you recommended by AI.

There is no guaranteed way to make an AI assistant recommend a specific business, and anyone who promises guaranteed AI rankings is not being straight with you. What follows is what we can genuinely influence, in the order it tends to matter.

This is different from traditional search in one respect: an AI assistant often summarises several sources into a single answer instead of showing a ranked list of links, so it can quote a competitor next to you, or instead of you, in the same response. The practical result is still the same, though. The businesses that show up are the ones that are easiest to find, verify, and trust.

Let AI crawlers access your site

An AI assistant can only reference your site if its crawler is allowed to access it, so the first check is your robots.txt file, not your content. Major AI crawlers include OpenAI's GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, Anthropic's ClaudeBot, and Perplexity's PerplexityBot, and each needs to be explicitly allowed if your robots.txt currently blocks unfamiliar bots.

Many sites end up blocking these crawlers by accident, often through a security plugin or a default hosting configuration set up before these bots existed. Checking your robots.txt file for these bot names takes a few minutes, and it's one of the checks we run as part of a technical SEO review.

It's worth checking this again after any website migration or hosting change, since a new server, content delivery network, or security tool can quietly reintroduce a block that was not there before. A crawler being blocked does not show up as an error on your own site, so nothing alerts you to it unless you check directly.

llms.txt: an emerging convention, not a guarantee

llms.txt is a proposed file, placed at the root of a website, that summarises a site's key pages in a simple format intended to help AI systems understand what a site covers. It is worth setting up if you have the time, but it is not an established or required standard the way robots.txt or a sitemap is, and there is no confirmation that major AI assistants currently rely on it to decide what to recommend.

Treat llms.txt as a low cost, forward looking addition rather than the main lever for AI visibility. The content on your actual pages, and what other sites say about you, still carry far more weight.

Write clear, quotable answers on your own pages

Pages that state a direct answer in the first sentence or two of a section are easier for an AI assistant to extract and quote than pages that build up to the point slowly. If someone asks an AI assistant a question your page answers, the assistant needs to find that answer quickly within your content, not infer it from marketing language.

This means writing plainly: state the fact, the price, or the process early in each section, then explain the detail afterward. It also means keeping business facts, your location, services, and pricing, consistent and clearly stated on your own site, since that is the version an AI assistant is most likely to trust as the source.

Structured data and consistent business facts

Structured data, or schema markup, gives search engines and AI systems a machine readable version of facts like your business name, address, services, and FAQs, reducing the chance of them being misread from visual layout alone. Organisation, LocalBusiness, and FAQ schema are the most relevant types for a service business to have in place.

Just as important is keeping your business name, address, and phone number consistent across your website, Google Business Profile, and any directories you appear in. Conflicting information across these sources makes it harder for any system, human or AI, to confirm which facts about your business are correct.

Service and pricing pages benefit from the same approach. Structured data on what you offer and what it costs gives an exact, structured version of that information, rather than leaving an AI system to interpret it from a page layout or a downloadable brochure.

Third party mentions and reviews matter most

What other sites say about your business generally carries more weight with AI assistants than what you say about yourself, because independent mentions are harder to fake and easier to trust. A Google Business Profile with genuine reviews, a listing on an agency directory like Clutch, coverage in local press, or an answer in a community forum all count as this kind of third party signal.

None of these can be manufactured convincingly, and trying to fake reviews or press coverage tends to backfire once discovered. The realistic path is to earn a small, steady stream of genuine mentions: ask satisfied clients for reviews, keep directory profiles accurate and complete, and pursue real press or community coverage where it fits your business.

It also helps to think about where your industry's genuine conversations already happen, whether that's a UAE business forum, a professional network discussion, or a review platform your customers already use, and to show up there honestly rather than only on your own website.

Bing, ChatGPT search, and Microsoft Copilot

ChatGPT's search feature and Microsoft Copilot lean heavily on Bing's search index rather than building an entirely separate one, so being properly indexed in Bing matters more for AI visibility than most businesses realise. Many UAE businesses set up Google Search Console and never touch Bing Webmaster Tools, which leaves a real gap in how these AI tools discover their pages.

Submitting your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools and using IndexNow, a protocol that tells Bing immediately when a page changes, are both straightforward ways to help make sure new or updated pages get picked up. Neither guarantees a mention from any AI assistant, but skipping them removes a channel that costs little to use.

This is easy to overlook, since Bing's own share of everyday search in the UAE is modest compared with Google, so most businesses reasonably focus on Google Search Console first. Adding Bing Webmaster Tools does not replace that focus, it adds a second, low effort channel once the basics are covered.

What to do next

Getting recommended by AI assistants comes from the same discipline as good SEO: being crawlable, being accurate, being clear, and being genuinely mentioned elsewhere. There is no shortcut and no guarantee, but each of the steps above is something you can check and improve this month.

Our GEO and AI search service covers crawler access, structured data, and content structure for AI visibility alongside standard SEO. If you are not sure where your site currently stands, start with our free SEO audit, or get in touch to talk through your situation.