The short answer
AI assistants recommend businesses they can find, read and trust. Mostly that means your own website, your Google and Bing listings, and your reviews. There’s no form to submit and no listing to buy.
Google says plainly that there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.”1 Its own guide calls optimising for AI search “still SEO.”2 So the work isn’t a new trick. It’s the old work done properly: a site the bots can reach, pages that answer real questions, and listings that say the same thing everywhere.
Can you submit your site, or pay to be listed?
No. One owner asked on OpenAI’s forum whether you can “submit my site to get verified by open ai/ chatgpt and be visible to it,” the way you submit a site to Google.3 There’s no such form. OpenAI’s help page says it ranks results by relevance and reliability, and that “placement is not guaranteed.”4
Google says the same about local results: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.”5 Anyone selling guaranteed placement in ChatGPT is selling something the AI companies say doesn’t exist.
Is your website letting the AI in?
Before anything else, check that the AI companies’ search crawlers are allowed to read your site. Each company runs separate bots: one that feeds its search answers, and one that collects pages to train its models. You can let the first in and keep the second out.6
| Crawler | What it does |
|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | Finds pages for ChatGPT search. Block it and your site “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.”6 |
| GPTBot | Collects pages to train OpenAI’s models. Blocking it doesn’t remove you from ChatGPT search. |
| Claude-SearchBot | Indexes pages for Claude’s search. Claude-User fetches a page when someone asks about it; ClaudeBot is for training.7 |
| PerplexityBot | Finds pages for Perplexity’s answers. Perplexity says it’s “not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.”8 |
| Googlebot | Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode use the normal Search index. Blocking Google-Extended doesn’t affect Search at all.9 |
Then check your host. Your site can block AI bots without you ever deciding to. Cloudflare, for one, changed its defaults for AI crawlers in 2025 and again in September 2026.10 OpenAI’s help page says your host or network has to let its search bot through.4 If whoever runs your site can’t tell you what those settings are, that’s the first thing to fix.
What AI reads about your business
When someone asks for a recommendation, the assistant searches the web and pulls from what it finds. For a business, that’s usually four places.
- Your website. In one large study of AI citations, websites were the biggest single source at 44%.11
- Your listings. Google says keeping your Business Profile current helps you show up in its AI answers.2 Microsoft says the same of Bing Places, for “address, hours, and contact information.”12 In the same study, listings were 42% of citations.11
- Your reviews. Google says the number of reviews and links to your business feed how prominent you are locally.5
- What others say about you. Google’s AI can show “what’s being said about products and services across the web, including in blogs, videos, and forum discussions.”2
Customers are already asking. In BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults, 45% said they’d used ChatGPT or another AI tool for local recommendations, up from 6% the year before.13 The same survey found that after reading positive reviews, 54% go on to check the business’s website. So the review gets you considered, and the website decides it.
What to put on your site so AI can quote it
Google’s guide is direct about what matters most: “Creating content that people find unique, compelling, and useful will likely influence your website’s presence in generative AI search in the long run more than any of the other suggestions in this guide.”2
Its own example is from real estate. A post like “7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers” is commodity content anyone could write. A post like “Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line” is something only one agent could write.2 The second kind is what gets quoted.
Research points the same way. A 2024 study from Princeton and others tested what makes a page more likely to be used in AI answers. Citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics helped most. Stuffing in keywords offered “little to no improvement.”14
In practice, for an established business:
- A page for each service, saying who it’s for, what it costs or what drives the cost, and how long it takes.
- Answers to the questions clients really ask on the first call, written the way they ask them.
- Real numbers from your own work: projects finished, years in business, how fast you reply.
- Key facts in plain text on the page, not only in a PDF, an image or a hidden tab.15
- Your name, phone number, hours and services the same on your site as on every listing.
Do you need llms.txt, schema or a GEO agency?
llms.txt
A proposed file that gives AI tools a plain-language map of your site.16 Google says creating one “will neither harm nor help” your visibility in Google Search, because Google ignores it.2 No other major AI search engine has said it uses the file to decide what to cite. It’s cheap to add, so we add one, but it isn’t the lever.
Schema (structured data)
Labels in your page’s code that say “this is a business, here are its hours.” Google says it isn’t required for AI search, but “it’s a good idea to continue using it.”2 One thing has changed: Google stopped showing FAQ rich results entirely on 7 May 2026.17 Advice that FAQ schema wins you extra space in Google is now out of date.
A GEO or AEO agency
Google warns that no outside tool “has access to our internal ranking or AI systems.”2 Be wary of anyone promising a spot in ChatGPT, or offering to place mentions of you around the web. Google calls chasing “inauthentic mentions” less helpful than it seems.2
How to tell if it’s working
“Is it possible that my brand isn’t showing up in AI-generated answers, and I have no way of knowing?”18 For a long time, yes. Now there are two free reports.
- Google Search Console has a generative AI performance report, and a setting that controls whether your site appears in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Sites are included by default.19
- Bing Webmaster Tools shows “how often your content is cited in generative answers,” and which pages.12
Then ask the assistants yourself, the way a client would: “Who’s the best [your service] for [your kind of client]?” Ask again every month and write down who gets named. One answer on one day doesn’t mean much, but the trend over a few months does.
A checklist for this week
- Search yourself in three assistants. ChatGPT, Google and Perplexity. Note who they name and what they say about you.
- Check your crawler settings. Ask whoever runs your site whether OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot are allowed, in robots.txt and at the host.
- Update your Google Business Profile and Bing Places. Hours, services, photos and a description in plain words.
- Make your details match. Name, phone and services, the same everywhere.
- Write one page only you could write. A real project, what it cost and what you learned.
- Ask your last five happy clients for a review. Reviews are one of the few signals Google names outright.
- Set up Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Both are free, and they’re the only way to see AI citations directly.
We do all of this for the sites we look after, and check the answers again every month. If you’d rather hand it off, tell us what you’re juggling.