How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT: a step-by-step plan

How ChatGPT decides who to recommend

When someone asks “what's the best CRM for a 2-person startup?”, ChatGPT often searches the web first, sometimes running several smaller searches at once. It reads the pages it finds, then names the businesses those pages describe most clearly and most often for that exact need.

So two things decide whether you're named: what your own pages say, and what other pages say about you. You need both.

Step 1: Find the questions buyers ask

Start with buying questions, not broad topics. These are the ones closest to a sale: “best [product] for [type of customer]”, “[you] vs [competitor]”, “[competitor] alternative”, “how much does [product] cost for [situation]”.

Group them into topics, and check the real search demand behind each topic. Don't trust “prompt volume” numbers: they're estimates. We explain why in AI prompt volume: why every number is an estimate.

Step 2: Give each question a page that answers it first

AI reads pages in chunks and lifts the clearest answer it can find. Four rules make that answer yours:

1. Answer first. Put the direct answer in the first lines of the page and of each section. Background comes after.
2. Make every section stand alone.Each heading's section should make sense on its own, because AI may quote just that part.
3. Be specific.Name products, prices, people, places and use cases. “Simple CRM for 2-person teams, $24 a month” beats “a powerful solution for growing businesses”.
4. Write short, plain sentences.“Acme helps 2-person sales teams track deals” is easier to quote than a long sentence full of clauses.

Add facts AI can quote: prices in plain text, a comparison table, and a short FAQ. Keep money pages fresh. Ahrefs found AI assistants cite noticeably newer pages than Google's regular results do.

Step 3: Get mentioned where AI looks

AI trusts what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself. Three kinds of mentions matter:

This matters more than most founders think. Across 75,000 brands, Ahrefs found brand mentions on the web tracked AI Overview visibility far more closely than backlinks did. For the community side, read how to use Reddit for AI visibility without getting banned.

Step 4: Make sure AI can read your site

• Allow AI crawlers.Check robots.txt doesn't block OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot (OpenAI), PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot.
• Don't hide text behind JavaScript.Some AI crawlers don't run it. Turn JavaScript off in your browser and reload your key pages: if the text is gone, AI may not see it either.
• Keep pages fast and the HTML clean. One H1, sensible headings, real lists and tables.
• Add structured data for your organization, products and FAQs.

Step 5: Track it honestly

AI answers change constantly. SparkToro and Gumshoe found the same prompt returns the same list of brands less than 1 time in 100. So checking ChatGPT once tells you almost nothing.

Pick 7 to 8 real buyer questions per topic and ask them many times, across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Watch how often you're named, in what position, and which pages get cited. Our AI tracker does this with the run count beside every number.

The order that works for a small business

1. Money pages first: pricing, alternatives, comparisons, your main product page.
2. Then one topic at a time, from the first question a buyer asks to the page that sells.
3. Off-site mentions alongside, starting with the threads and lists AI already cites.
4. Track, adjust, repeat.

If you want the plan done for you, Selka finds the questions, tells you which pages to write and fix, and shows when AI starts naming you.