How to get your B2B company recommended by ChatGPT

Step 1: Find out what ChatGPT says today

Ask the questions your buyers ask, in their words, on chatgpt.com while signed out. Ask each one at least three times: only 30% of brands stay visible from one answer to the next. Write down who is named, how you are described if at all, and which sites are cited.

Ask two kinds of question: about your company (“what is [company]?”) and about your category (“what are the best [category] tools for [buyer]?”). The gap between them is usually the story. In a small sample of four Swiss B2B tech companies we measured on 28 October 2026, engines named each company in all 36 answers about the company itself, but in only 24 of 60 answers to shortlist questions.

Step 2: Let ChatGPT read your site

OpenAI's crawler documentation is explicit: OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT's search features, and sites that opt out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot is separate and concerns training; you can block one and allow the other.

Then check that your key pages show their text in the HTML your server returns, not only after JavaScript runs. Many crawlers do not run JavaScript, so a page that only shows its text after rendering may look empty to them.

Step 3: Make it unmistakable who you are

If your name is shared with other companies, AI answers will mix you up. When we measured our own company, REVEX, every answer that mentioned the name was about something else: a UK currency firm, a supplement or a review tool. The fixes are dull and effective: one consistent description of what you do, used everywhere; Organization structured data on your site; and profiles on the sites engines use to identify companies.

Step 4: Publish the pages shortlists are built from

When buyers ask for recommendations, engines lean on pages that answer exactly that question. The clearest published example is Ramp: four bottom-funnel pages (accounts payable software for small businesses, for large businesses, a “top 6” comparison that included competitors, and AI in accounts payable) took its AI visibility from 3.2% to 22.2% in about ten weeks (Alex Birkett). Semrush took its share of voice on 39 buying-intent prompts from 13% to 32% in a month, partly by adding direct answers and product mentions to pages that already ranked.

• A comparison or “best [category] for [buyer]” page that includes competitors honestly
• Use-case pages for each buyer segment
• Alternatives pages for the competitors buyers compare you with
• Answers to the objections buyers raise: price, security, implementation, proof

Step 5: Get mentioned where ChatGPT looks

Most of what AI engines cite is not the brand's own website: Muck Rack found earned media accounts for 82% of AI citations. For ChatGPT specifically, Profound found Wikipedia, Reddit, Forbes and G2 among the most-cited sources, and 5W's synthesis of nine studies reports, citing Semrush data, that LinkedIn is cited in 14.3% of ChatGPT search responses.

There is good news for smaller companies here: Ahrefs found ChatGPT the least influenced by traditional brand-authority signals of the three engines it studied, which makes it the most realistic place to start.

Step 6: Measure monthly and be patient

Re-run the same questions every month, several runs each, and keep a group of questions you deliberately do not work on so you can tell your effect from changes in the engine. In published cases, first citations have appeared after about six weeks; Novig reached the top position at week 12. See how to measure AI search visibility.

Shortcuts to avoid

• Fake or incentivised reviews. They break review-site rules and the trust that makes reviews worth citing.
• Aged or sock-puppet community accounts. Undisclosed promotion breaks most communities' rules and gets accounts banned.
• Paying for listicle placements without disclosure. A ranking that can be bought is a ranking engines will eventually learn to discount.
• Keyword-stuffed pages. In tests of GEO techniques, keyword stuffing was often worse than doing nothing.