Answer
How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?
To be cited by AI assistants, make sure their crawlers are not blocked in your robots.txt, publish structured data describing your organisation and services, write pages that answer questions directly in the first sixty words, and build citations on third-party sites assistants already trust. Direct AI referrals are around one percent of web traffic today. Top brands capture most citations in any sector, so results for small businesses are uneven.
- AI share of web traffic
- around 1%, growing ~300% year on year
- Share of AI citations taken by top 10 brands
- roughly 47%
- Long tail share
- roughly 12%
- First thing to check
- robots.txt is not blocking AI crawlers
- Biggest single lever
- third-party citations and reviews
- Honest verdict
- worth doing, easy to oversell
Start by checking you are not blocked
Before any optimisation, open your robots.txt and look for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and CCBot. If any are followed by a disallow rule, assistants cannot read your site at all.
This is more common than people expect. Several popular plugins and hosts added AI-crawler blocking by default during 2024 and 2025, and many site owners have no idea it is there.
Write the answer first, not last
Assistants extract answers. A page that opens with brand language and reaches the answer in paragraph six gives them nothing clean to take.
Put a direct, complete answer in the first sixty words after the heading — one that would stand alone if quoted with no other context. State the numbers plainly. Then expand below for the human reader. This single change does more than any technical measure.
Structured data does the heavy lifting
Schema markup describing your organisation, your services, your locations, your hours and your frequently asked questions is a published standard read by both search engines and assistants. FAQPage markup in particular is the most reliable way to have an answer quoted directly.
Prices matter here more than people realise. Very few businesses publish prices in structured form, so when an assistant is asked what something costs in your city, the handful who did are the ones it can quote.
What actually decides citations
Being mentioned elsewhere. Assistants weight sources they already trust — directories, review platforms, industry associations, local press, and any site that already ranks well. Your own website is one input among many, and rarely the decisive one.
Which means the highest-return work is unglamorous: a complete and accurate Google Business Profile, genuine reviews, correct listings in the directories your industry actually uses, and mentions on sites in your sector. Answer-engine optimisation, done honestly, is mostly reputation work with a technical layer on top.
The part being oversold
The market for AI-search optimisation filled up very quickly. There are already published directories listing sixty or more agencies specialising in it, a tooling market well past two billion dollars, and price convergence that usually signals commoditisation.
Meanwhile the traffic is genuinely about one percent of visits, and citation share concentrates heavily in large established brands. Both things are true: it is real and growing, and it is being sold far ahead of what it currently delivers. Do it because it is cheap and compounding, not because somebody told you a fifth of your customers now arrive this way. They do not.
Related questions we get
How do I check whether an assistant knows my business?
Ask it. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude and ask for the best provider of what you do in your city, then ask directly about your business by name. You will quickly see whether it knows you, and whether what it says is accurate.
It said something wrong about my business. Can I correct it?
Not directly. You correct the sources — your own site, your Google Business Profile, directory listings, anywhere carrying outdated information. Assistants reflect what they can find, so fixing the inputs is the only reliable route.
Is this replacing Google?
Not yet, and not on the current numbers. Around one percent of visits arrive through AI referrals. It is growing quickly and converting well, which is why it is worth preparing for — but a business that abandons search engine optimisation for this would be making an expensive mistake.
Should I pay an agency specifically for AI search optimisation?
As a standalone service, be careful — the outcome is largely outside anyone's control, and citation share is dominated by large brands. As a component of proper technical and content work, it is sensible and inexpensive. Judge any proposal by whether it also covers structured data, content and reputation, or only the AI part.
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