How ChatGPT picks
who to recommend.

ChatGPT doesn't keep a list of approved businesses. For anything current, like 'best hot water plumber in Gosford', it searches the web automatically when the question needs it, and it can use your approximate location to do it.

The searching isn't all done in-house. OpenAI says it may share questions with third-party search providers such as Bing. One study by Seer Interactive found more than 87% of ChatGPT's citations matched Bing's top 20 results for the same question, against 56% for Google. It was a small study, about 100 questions in early 2025, so treat it as a direction, not a law.

That direction matters here. Most Australian businesses put everything into Google and have never looked at Bing. If ChatGPT is reading Bing's results, being invisible on Bing is a problem you've never been measured on.

Before any of the clever stuff, ChatGPT has to be allowed in. OpenAI's search crawler is called OAI-SearchBot, and a site that blocks it in robots.txt won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers.

There's a separate crawler, GPTBot, that collects content for training. You can block that one and stay visible in search: OpenAI treats them as independent settings. Plenty of people block both because they read a headline about AI scraping.

Check your hosting too. In July 2025 Cloudflare started asking every new domain whether to allow AI crawlers, with blocking as the default. If your site sits behind Cloudflare, it's worth two minutes to see what you agreed to.

Once ChatGPT has its search results, it writes from the pattern across them. A business mentioned on its own site, three directories, a local news story and two 'best of' lists is a safer answer than one that's only on its own site.

The best data on this so far is correlation, not proof. Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands and found branded web mentions had a 0.664 correlation with ChatGPT visibility, while Domain Rating, the backlink score SEOs love, sat at 0.266. Mentions on YouTube correlated more strongly still. Ahrefs is clear that correlation isn't causation, and so am I. But it lines up with how the answers read: being talked about beats being linked to.

For local businesses, BrightLocal says AI answers may draw on reviews, directories, business websites and social media. OpenAI hasn't published which review sources it uses, so don't bet everything on one platform.

If you sell products, shopping results work differently. OpenAI says product results are chosen independently, are not ads, and use structured data like price and description from first-party and third-party providers. Merchants are ranked on factors like availability, price and quality.

Shopify and Etsy catalogues are already connected, and other merchants can apply to send a product feed. Clean product data does more here than clever copy.

You don't need a tool to get a first read. Write five questions a real customer would ask, the way they'd ask them. Run each one in ChatGPT with search on, and in Google's AI Mode if you can. Tick whether you were named and note who was named instead.

Use the tally below. It stays in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.

OpenAI started testing ads in ChatGPT in the United States in February 2026. It says ads are labelled, shown separately from the answer, and don't influence what ChatGPT says. So even when ads reach Australia, buying one won't get you recommended in the answer itself.

That's the honest bit of this whole topic. There's no button to press. You earn the recommendation the slow way: be easy to find, be easy to read, and be mentioned by people other than yourself.