Where ChatGPT learns about businesses
ChatGPT answers in two ways. Without search, it uses what the model learned from text on the web before its training cutoff. With search, it fetches current pages, summarizes them and links to the sources. Questions asking for a business recommendation often trigger search, so what can be found today matters.
OpenAI runs three crawlers. Whether they can reach your site decides whether ChatGPT can read it:
| Crawler | What it does |
|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | Indexes pages for search in ChatGPT. Without it your site will not appear in results with links. |
| ChatGPT-User | Visits a page when a ChatGPT user asks it to read that page. |
| GPTBot | Collects content to train future models. |
Seven steps to visibility in ChatGPT
- 01
Check what ChatGPT says today
Ask the questions your customers ask, for example for a recommendation in your industry and city. Note who appears in the answers and which sources are cited.
- 02
Let OpenAI's crawlers in
Check robots.txt and your firewall or CDN settings. OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User must be able to fetch your pages, and blocks are often accidental.
- 03
Get indexed in Google and Bing
Connect Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap and fix pages left out of the index. A site search engines do not know rarely makes it into AI answers.
- 04
Write answers to customer questions
Service pages, pricing and an FAQ with the answer in the first paragraph, in 40 to 60 words. Specifics: services, cities, prices or ranges, availability.
- 05
Add structured data
Organization or LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage in JSON-LD tell machines plainly what the business is and what it offers.
- 06
Earn mentions on other websites
Business directories, guest articles, industry sites and customer reviews. ChatGPT is more likely to recommend a business that others write about too.
- 07
Track the same questions every week
The same list of questions asked regularly shows whether your business appears more often. A single screenshot says nothing, because answers vary.
What not to do
- Paid spots on "best business" lists with no real review behind them
- Text hidden from people but shown to bots
- Writing reviews of your own business
- Blocking AI crawlers if you want to be in their answers
- Business details that differ between your site and directories
Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok and Copilot
Each assistant draws on different sources, so we check each one separately, on the same list of questions:
| Assistant | Where its answers come from |
|---|---|
| Gemini | Google's assistant. It draws on what Google knows about businesses and websites. |
| Perplexity | An answer engine. Each sentence carries a footnote to the page it came from. |
| Claude | Anthropic's assistant. With web search it summarizes pages and cites its sources. |
| Grok | xAI's assistant built into X. It answers from web search and from posts on X. |
| Microsoft Copilot | Microsoft's assistant in Windows and Edge. It answers from Bing search, so we check it together with your Bing data. |
How long until ChatGPT mentions your business
For answers that come from search, a change can show up once the crawler revisits your site and other sources, and the new content is indexed. What the model itself knows changes only with new model versions, so it moves more slowly.
There is no single timeline for every business, because it depends on the industry, the competition and the state of the site at the start. That is why we measure every week and show the direction of change from the first measurement.
ChatGPT and other assistants in Querora plans
In every plan we ask a fixed list of questions every week in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and in the Growth and Pro plans also in Claude, Grok and Microsoft Copilot. The report shows how many answers mention your business, who appears next to you and which sources the answer uses.
Alongside tracking we do the work from the steps above: fixes on your site, answer-first content, structured data and links from other websites, in the amounts written into your plan.