How do I get my business on ChatGPT?

Can you register or pay to get your business on ChatGPT?

No, and there is no partial version of yes. OpenAI operates no business directory, no submission form and no paid local listing. Its help article on ChatGPT search puts the eligibility test in two parts: allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl the site, and confirm your host permits traffic from OpenAI’s published searchbot IP addresses. That is the whole of the opt-in. There is no account to open and no fee to pay.

This matters because the gap is being filled by cold callers. If someone offers to register your business with ChatGPT for a monthly fee, they are charging for a process that does not exist. What they can genuinely do is write clearer pages, fix your indexing and tidy your listings — ordinary website jobs, and you are entitled to see them described that way rather than as access to a channel nobody can sell.

OpenAI does now sell advertising inside ChatGPT, and runs a separate crawler, OAI-AdsBot, for pages submitted as ads. That is a different thing. Being recommended is earned and free; the ad slot is bought and labelled.

How does ChatGPT actually find and name a business?

It runs a search at the moment you ask, and not against one source. OpenAI’s help article says ChatGPT “typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries” and sends those to search providers, then may send further, more specific queries after reading the results. So “recommend a good electrician in Wrexham” becomes several narrower searches, and the answer is assembled from what comes back.

Two things follow. You are not being ranked in a list that exists somewhere; you are being retrieved against a question that was rewritten on the fly. And OpenAI states directly that “ChatGPT ranks search results using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information. Placement is not guaranteed.”

The four OpenAI crawlers, and what each one does

OpenAI’s crawler documentation, checked 15 September 2026, lists four, and confuses almost everybody because two of them sound interchangeable.

Does ChatGPT use Google or Bing?

OpenAI has never said. Its announcement of 31 October 2024 states only that “ChatGPT search leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by our partners,” and it does not name them. Alongside that, OpenAI crawls the web itself with OAI-SearchBot and publishes the IP ranges it crawls from. That is the full extent of what is on the record.

Correction to the earlier version of this guide. Until this update, this page told you flatly that ChatGPT searches Bing’s index. That was true of the Bing-powered browsing feature in 2023, and it is no longer something OpenAI confirms. We were repeating an industry assumption as a fact, and we have taken it out. It matters to you because it changes what you should do: getting into Bing is still worth doing, but it is worth doing for Copilot, where the link is documented, rather than on the strength of a claim about ChatGPT that nobody can support.

Which AI assistants need Bing indexing, and which need Google?

People search for ChatGPT and mean all of them, so here is the split, with the source for each. This is the practically useful fact and almost nobody states it plainly: Copilot rides on Bing, Google’s AI features ride on Google, and ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude each run their own crawler.

So the answer to “do I need Bing?” is yes, but for a named reason: Copilot is built into Windows, Edge and Microsoft 365, and Bing is the one place that reports anything measurable about AI citations. Start with Bing Webmaster Tools, and if your site changes often, IndexNow tells Bing the moment a page changes.

Why doesn’t ChatGPT know my business?

In nearly every case we look at it is one of four things, worth checking in this order because each makes the next pointless if it is wrong.

• You are blocking a crawler by accident. Usually inherited from a template, a plugin or a well-meaning developer who blocked “the AI bots” in one go.
• You are not indexed. Google may have you and Bing may not, or a staging setting may have left a noindex in place. Nothing can cite a page it cannot retrieve.
• Your pages never state the facts. “An emergency electrician near Basingstoke who takes card” filters on area, trade, availability and payment. If those words are not on your site as text, you are not a candidate.
• Your facts disagree with each other. A different phone number on your website and your directory entries gives an assistant nothing it can safely repeat, so it repeats someone else instead.

How do I check my robots.txt for accidental blocks?

It takes a minute and needs no tools. Type your domain followed by /robots.txt into a browser, for example yourbusiness.co.uk/robots.txt. You are reading a plain text file. Look for these, in order:

• A group beginning User-agent: * followed by Disallow: /. That blocks everything from everyone, and it is the one that quietly does the most damage.
• A group naming OAI-SearchBot with a Disallow line. That is the one that removes you from ChatGPT search answers.
• Groups naming bingbot or Googlebot with Disallow lines. Those remove you from Copilot and from Google’s AI features respectively.
• Groups naming PerplexityBot or Claude-SearchBot, if you want those two as well.

No file at all means no restrictions, which is fine. To be explicit, a group of User-agent: OAI-SearchBot followed by Allow: / says so. OpenAI notes a robots.txt change takes around 24 hours to register; Perplexity says the same.

How do I test whether ChatGPT names my business?

Ask it several times, and treat one run as worthless: answers vary between runs, accounts and models, so a single test proves nothing. Run each of these three or four times over a couple of days and write down who appears.

• “Recommend a good [what you do] in [your town].” This is the question a customer actually asks. Note whether you appear, and who does.
• “What do you know about [your business name] in [your town]?” This shows whether you are known at all, and whether the details are right. A wrong phone number is worse than silence.
• “Who covers [a village you serve] for [your service]?” Narrow prompts are where a small business realistically wins, because there are few candidates.
• Ask a filtering question — emergency call-outs, weekend work, a specific accreditation. If your site never states it, watch a competitor who does get named instead.
• Then repeat the lot in Copilot, Google’s AI Mode, Perplexity and Claude. They retrieve from different places, so the picture is rarely the same, and the gaps tell you which index is missing you.

What Bing’s AI Performance report can and cannot tell you

It is the only free first-party reporting on AI citations that exists, and narrower than people assume. Microsoft launched AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools in public preview on 10 February 2026, reporting four things — total citations, average cited pages, grounding queries and page-level citation activity — across “Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations.”

What it cannot do: give you a ChatGPT-only figure, show your share against competitors, or list every prompt. Microsoft states the grounding queries data is “a sample of overall citation activity”. Treat it as a direction of travel, not a scoreboard. Nothing OpenAI publishes offers an equivalent.

How long does it take to appear in ChatGPT?

The only published number is 24 hours, and it is not the number people want. OpenAI says that for search results “it can take ~24 hours from a site’s robots.txt update for our systems to adjust”, which governs opting in and out. There is no published figure for how long a new page takes to start being cited. An earlier version of this guide gave 30 to 90 days for long-tail prompts and 6 to 12 months for competitive ones; we have removed those because we could not trace them to a source that publishes its method.

Is generative engine optimisation (GEO) worth paying for?

It depends entirely on what is in the invoice, and there are three claims that should end the conversation. There is no submission process, so nobody can “list” you. There is no ranking dashboard owned by the AI companies, so nobody can show you position 3. And no one can guarantee a mention: OpenAI says placement is not guaranteed, and Google states in its own documentation that “there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.”

What is left is worth having, and it is not new: clear service pages, real towns named in text, consistent details, being indexed. An agency doing those well is worth paying. The rebrand is what to be sceptical about, not the work.

Reading the studies honestly

Two get quoted at UK small businesses a lot, and both deserve their label.

• Ahrefs, 3 September 2025. Analysed roughly 3,311 short-tail queries and found only 10% of ChatGPT’s cited URLs also appeared in Google’s top 10, against about 65% for Perplexity — consistent with ChatGPT re-ranking rather than copying a results page. Ahrefs sells SEO tools, so it is not independent.
• 365i, 28 January 2026. Ran its own AI Visibility Checker over 100 UK small business websites in six sectors. The widely repeated “only 3 in 100 UK businesses show up in ChatGPT” is a misreading: 3 of the 100 had AI discovery files, and the average 31 out of 100 is 365i’s own score, not a measure of whether ChatGPT named anyone. 365i is a web design agency selling AI visibility services. Our previous version repeated the misreading; we are correcting it here.

One finding is worth keeping even with the caveats: 365i reported 74 of the 100 sites blocking GPTBot in robots.txt, most without knowing. That matches what we see — and as above, it is the block that does not actually cost you ChatGPT visibility. The one that does is rarer and quieter.

What actually gets you named, in order

Five things, none of them glamorous, all of them free apart from your time. In this order, because each one depends on the one before it.

• 1. Be reachable. Check robots.txt as above, confirm no stray noindex, and check your host or firewall is not blocking OpenAI’s published IP ranges, listed at openai.com/searchbot.json.
• 2. Be indexed in both. Google for AI Overviews and AI Mode, Bing for Copilot. Two free accounts, Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, will tell you whether either has your pages.
• 3. Say what you do and where, in plain text. A page per main service, the towns named in sentences, not in a photograph or a slideshow. Our guides on writing a service page and location pages cover the layout.
• 4. Write down the facts a question filters on. Hours, call-out policy, payment methods, accreditations, which postcodes. Short paragraphs of 40 to 80 words answering one question each are what gets lifted into an answer.
• 5. Keep your details identical everywhere. A Google Business Profile, the main directories and your own site all saying the same name, address and phone number. Corroboration is what makes a machine willing to repeat you.

Schema markup is worth adding as hygiene; it labels your details unambiguously. It is not the lever. Neither is llms.txt, which no major assistant has published support for.

What this looks like on a real site

One worked example, clearly labelled: these are one site’s numbers, not a benchmark. A Hampshire building firm we work with, whose site is plain HTML with a page per service and a page per town, was shown as a clickable source in monitored AI answers 5,869 times over 91 days, and appeared in Google and Bing results more than 130,000 times in roughly three months.

Nothing exotic produced that: no llms.txt, no AI agency, no monthly fee, no submission anywhere. Just readable pages saying what the firm does and where, a robots.txt that blocks nothing by accident, and consistent details. It is the unremarkable version of this working, and the remarkable versions being advertised to you generally are not.

What to do first

Two things, free, about half an hour. Open yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt and read it for accidental blocks. Then ask ChatGPT, Copilot and Google’s AI Mode to recommend your service in your town, three times each, and write down who appears instead of you.

That gives you the two facts that matter: whether the assistants can reach you, and whether anything about you is currently good enough to quote. Everything else here is downstream of those. If your site is reachable and still never named, the problem is almost always that your pages do not say, in words, the things a customer’s question is filtering on.

Common questions

How do I register my business on ChatGPT?

You cannot, because there is nothing to register with. OpenAI publishes no business directory, no submission form and no paid listing for local businesses. Its own help article says any website or publisher can choose to appear in ChatGPT search, and the way you choose is to allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and let OpenAI's published IP ranges reach your site. Anyone charging a monthly fee to add you to ChatGPT is charging for a process that does not exist.

Does ChatGPT use Google or Bing?

OpenAI does not say which. Its launch announcement of 31 October 2024 states that ChatGPT search leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by our partners, and it has never named those providers. It also runs its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot. So the honest answer is that ChatGPT uses OpenAI's own crawl plus unnamed outside providers. An earlier version of this guide said it was Bing. That was too confident and we have corrected it.

Does blocking GPTBot stop my business appearing in ChatGPT?

No. OpenAI's crawler documentation says each setting is independent of the others, and gives the exact example of allowing OAI-SearchBot to appear in search results while disallowing GPTBot so that content is not used for training. GPTBot governs model training. OAI-SearchBot governs whether you can be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Blocking the wrong one is the single most common accidental mistake we see.

How long does it take to show up in ChatGPT?

The only published number is for opting in and out. OpenAI states that for search results it can take around 24 hours from a site's robots.txt update for its systems to adjust. There is no published figure for how long a new or improved page takes to start being cited, because that depends on crawling, on the search providers involved and on whether anyone asks a question your page answers. Treat anyone quoting a 30 to 90 day guarantee as guessing.

Is generative engine optimisation worth paying for?

Be careful what you are buying. There is no submission process, no ranking dashboard owned by the AI companies and no way to guarantee a mention. OpenAI's own help article says ChatGPT ranks search results using multiple factors and that placement is not guaranteed. Google states there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary. Paying someone to write clearer pages and fix your indexing is reasonable. Paying for a guaranteed AI mention is not.

Why doesn't ChatGPT know my business?

Usually one of four things. Your robots.txt blocks a crawler you did not mean to block. Your pages are not indexed anywhere an assistant can retrieve them. Your site never states the plain facts a question filters on, such as the towns you cover and the work you do. Or the facts it does state disagree with your listings elsewhere, so the assistant has nothing it can safely repeat. Check them in that order.

Do I need an llms.txt file to appear in ChatGPT?

No. No major assistant has published support for it as a way of getting a business into answers, and Google states plainly that you don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. OpenAI's crawler documentation names robots.txt and nothing else. An llms.txt file is harmless to add and costs nothing, but it is not the reason anyone gets named.

Can I see whether AI answers are citing my website?

Partly. Bing Webmaster Tools added an AI Performance report in public preview on 10 February 2026, reporting total citations, average cited pages, grounding queries and page-level citation activity across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. Microsoft says the grounding queries figure is a sample of overall citation activity. It does not give you a ChatGPT-only number, and neither does anything else OpenAI publishes.

Sources, all checked 15 September 2026. OpenAI, “Overview of OpenAI Crawlers”, developers.openai.com — the four crawlers, the independence of the settings, the ~24 hour robots.txt lag, and the published IP ranges at openai.com/searchbot.json. OpenAI help centre, “ChatGPT Search” — query rewriting, the eligibility test, and “placement is not guaranteed”. OpenAI, “Introducing ChatGPT search”, 31 October 2024 — third-party search providers and partner content. Google Search Central, “AI features and your website” — no additional requirements, no AI text files needed, and the indexed-and-snippet-eligible rule. Microsoft Learn, “Data, privacy, and security for web search in Microsoft Copilot” — Copilot sending generated queries to the Bing search service. Bing Webmaster Blog, “Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview”, 10 February 2026 — the metrics, surfaces and sampling caveat. Perplexity, “Perplexity Crawlers” — PerplexityBot and the 24 hour window. Anthropic support, “Does Anthropic crawl data from the web…” — ClaudeBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot. Ahrefs, 3 September 2025, ~3,311 short-tail queries; Ahrefs sells SEO software and is not an independent researcher. 365i, 28 January 2026, 100 UK small business websites scored with the agency’s own tool; 365i sells AI visibility services and is not independent. The Hampshire building firm figures are one site’s own reporting over the periods stated and are not a benchmark. Removed from this guide because no source publishing its method could be found: the share of UK local businesses ever named by ChatGPT, the claim that AI referrals convert around nine times better than organic search, the claim that AI sends about 1% of web traffic, and any timescale for a first AI mention. OpenAI does not name its third-party search providers, so no page can honestly say whose index ChatGPT reads. Bing Places has moved: bingplaces.com now redirects to bing.com/forbusiness.