How to make your business show up in ChatGPT: a checklist for a small business

How to make your business show up in ChatGPT

To make your business show up in ChatGPT, first work out which way your customers would meet you there. A café, an online shop and an accounting firm each reach ChatGPT by a different door.

This guide is a checklist for a small business with no marketing team. It names the four doors, says what each one needs, and links to the page from OpenAI or Microsoft behind each step. It does not promise a result, because nobody outside OpenAI can.

Route one: your website, through web search

When ChatGPT searches the web, it can find, read and cite your website. This route is open to every business, and it is the one to fix first.

OpenAI's help page says ChatGPT "may search the web automatically when your question would benefit from current information". When it does, it rewrites the question into shorter search queries and sends them to search providers, and its answer can include citations (OpenAI help). The same page lists Microsoft, which runs Bing, among those providers. Our page on how ChatGPT reads the web sets out the crawlers and the search step in one place.

• Check that your robots.txt does not block OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says sites that block it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" (OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers).
• Make sure your site is in Bing as well as Google. Bing Webmaster Tools is free, and so is submitting a sitemap there.
• Give every service its own page, with a plain heading that says what it is and where you offer it.
• Put your prices, hours and areas served on the page as text, not only inside a photo or a PDF.

If you want the full detail on crawlers and robots.txt, read how to get your website to show up in ChatGPT. If you want the detail on how sources are chosen, read how to rank in ChatGPT search.

Route two: local results

For "near me" questions, ChatGPT uses the person’s approximate location and information from third-party providers such as business listings. A local business needs its details right in those places as well as on its own site.

OpenAI's help page says ChatGPT "may use an approximate location based on your IP address to provide relevant local results", and that it "may share your location with trusted third-party providers that help provide more local information, such as nearby business listings or weather reports" (OpenAI help). Its own example turns "good restaurants near me" into the search "top restaurants San Francisco".

OpenAI does not name every listing provider. For restaurants it does: reservation search may show availability from OpenTable, Resy or Yelp, depending on the restaurant and the country. Resy reservations are U.S. only, Yelp reservations cover the U.S. and Canada, and OpenTable is global, according to the same page.

• Write your town or neighbourhood into your page titles and headings, the way a customer would say it.
• Keep your name, address, phone number and hours the same on your site and on every listing you control.
• If you run a restaurant, keep your OpenTable, Resy or Yelp profile current, since those are the services ChatGPT names for bookings.
• Reply to reviews and fix wrong details on directory sites. A listing that says you closed last year can outweigh your own homepage.

Route three: product listings

If you sell products online, ChatGPT can show them with images and prices when a shopper asks what to buy. You get there by sharing a product feed, which is a file listing your products, or by selling through Shopify or Etsy.

OpenAI's merchant page says: "If you sell through Shopify or Etsy, your catalog is already integrated, and no additional setup or application is required." Other merchants can apply to share a feed, and those who already applied are on a waitlist (OpenAI, ChatGPT merchants).

The same page says shopping is currently live for ChatGPT users in the U.S. and that OpenAI is building a self-serve merchant platform for later this year. It also says there are "no fees for purchases made on your site or app", and that OpenAI is moving away from its standalone Instant Checkout, so purchases are completed on the merchant’s own site.

If you sell on Shopify or Etsy, OpenAI says your catalogue is already in ChatGPT. Your job is to make each product’s title, description and price complete and correct.

OpenAI says "richer data helps your products surface with more accurate information when shoppers compare options". In plain terms, fill in every field. Use a product title a shopper would type, a description that states size, material and use, real photos and a current price and stock level.

Route four: ads, and what they do not buy

ChatGPT now shows ads, but an ad sits below the answer and does not change it. Paying gets you a labelled slot, not a place in the recommendation.

OpenAI began testing ads in the U.S. in February 2026, for logged-in adults on the Free and Go plans, and says paid plans such as Plus and Pro do not show ads. In March 2026 it announced pilots in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In August 2026 it said ads had launched in the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea (OpenAI, Testing ads in ChatGPT).

OpenAI's words on this are plain: "Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you." When you submit an ad, a crawler called OAI-AdsBot may visit the landing page to check it meets OpenAI's policies (OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers). Ads can be a useful extra, but they are not a substitute for routes one to three.

Three things that quietly hide a small business

Most small businesses that never appear in ChatGPT are not being judged and rejected. They are simply not being seen, for one of three ordinary reasons.

• A security setting blocks AI crawlers. Many sites sit behind a service such as Cloudflare, which offers settings to block AI bots by what they do.
• The details are only in pictures. A menu photographed as an image, or a price list in a PDF, is harder for any crawler to read than plain text on the page.
• The site never says where. A plumber whose pages never name the town gives a "near me" search nothing to match.

The first one deserves a closer look. Cloudflare sorts AI bots into three kinds: Search, for crawlers that index content to answer questions later; Agent, for bots acting in real time for a person; and Training. It says that from 15 September 2026, new domains block Training and Agent bots on pages that show ads by default, while "Search will remain allowed" (Cloudflare, Block AI Bots). An older setting or a strict firewall rule can still block more than you meant to, so ask whoever set up your site to check.

The other two are fixes you can make yourself in an afternoon. Type the menu or price list onto the page. Add your town to the page title and the first sentence. Then ask ChatGPT again.

The checklist

Work through these ten steps in order. The first five cost nothing but an afternoon, and they are the ones most often missed.

1. Write down ten questions a customer might ask ChatGPT before choosing a business like yours. Include your town if you serve one.
2. Ask ChatGPT each question three times and write down which businesses it names and which pages it cites.
3. Open your robots.txt file and check that OAI-SearchBot is not blocked. Ask whoever runs your site to check the firewall too.
4. Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. Microsoft lists sitemaps and IndexNow among the ways Bing finds pages.
5. Make sure your homepage says, in one plain sentence, what you do, for whom and where.
6. Give each main service or product its own page, with its price or a price range in text.
7. Correct your name, address, hours and phone number on every listing you control.
8. If you sell products online, check your Shopify or Etsy product data, or apply to share a feed.
9. Ask happy customers to review you on the sites that ChatGPT cited in step 2.
10. Ask the same ten questions again in a month, the same way, and compare.

Step 9 rests on outside evidence. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that mentions of a brand on other websites and on YouTube tracked how often AI assistants named it far more closely than backlinks did (Ahrefs). Ahrefs is clear that this is correlation, not proof of cause. It still points the same way: being talked about elsewhere matters.

Step 4 rests on Microsoft's own advice. Its guidelines say discovery depends on "IndexNow URL submission", "XML sitemaps", "Crawlable internal links" and "External links from relevant websites" (Bing Webmaster Guidelines).

When a tool is worth it, and when it is not

For a local business with ten questions, the checklist above and a notebook are enough. A tool starts to pay when you have many questions, several assistants and a need to see change over months.

Agentcites is built for a business with a website whose buyers research before they buy. It reads your site, writes the questions those buyers ask, and puts them to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and DeepSeek every week. It keeps every answer, says which brands were named, explains why you lost each question, and drafts a page aimed at one you lost. It does not manage business listings, product feeds or ads. The plan is $149 a month per website, and the pricing page lists the rest.