How to show up in ChatGPT. First check that your website isn't blocking it

Someone asks ChatGPT where nearby they can get their car's air conditioning fixed this week. They get three garages with links to their websites. Your garage is two streets away and isn't on the list. That is when an owner starts looking up how to show up in ChatGPT.

Nobody knows for sure whether ChatGPT will recommend your business. But some things depend on you, and you can check them yourself. One of them can take your site out of the answers completely.

Where ChatGPT gets the businesses it recommends

ChatGPT can answer from what the model learned earlier, or it can search the web. When it searches, you see links under the answer to the pages it took the information from. For a question about a local business, those links are what matters to you.

OpenAI uses two different crawlers for search and for training. They are easy to mix up.

OAI-SearchBot collects pages for search in ChatGPT. OpenAI says plainly that sites which block it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. At most they can appear as a plain navigational link.

GPTBot collects content for training models. Blocking it signals that you don't want your content used for training. According to OpenAI, each of these settings works independently of the other. So you can opt out of training and still stay in search.

One line in robots.txt

The robots.txt file tells crawlers what they are not allowed to do. Open your site's address in a browser, add /robots.txt to it and look for two entries.

The first is User-agent: OAI-SearchBot with a Disallow: / line under it. That takes you out of ChatGPT search. The second is User-agent: * with the same Disallow: /. The asterisk means every crawler at once, so this closes the site to Google as well.

Sometimes a line like this is left over from work on a new version of the site. Sometimes someone blocked all AI crawlers "just in case" and didn't know that some of them handle search, not training. After you fix the file, OpenAI says it can take about a day for its systems to pick up the change.

We wrote about what else a crawler sees on your site in What a crawler sees when it opens your site.

Claude has its own search crawler too

Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, describes three crawlers. ClaudeBot collects content that may be used to train models. Claude-User opens a page when someone asks Claude a question. Claude-SearchBot goes through pages so that search results in Claude are more relevant.

According to Anthropic, blocking Claude-SearchBot may reduce your site's visibility in search results for Claude users. Blocking Claude-User means Claude can't fetch your page even when a user asks it to. ClaudeBot is about training.

Whether to allow training is your decision, and either answer is fine. But if you want assistants to be able to find you, leave the search crawlers open.

How to check whether ChatGPT recommends your business

The simplest test is one you do by hand. Ask ChatGPT the way a customer would. Don't give your business name. Describe the need instead, for example "who nearby can fix the air conditioning in my car on the same day". Add your town or district, because a customer would too.

See whom the assistant names and which pages it gives as sources. Open them and compare them with yours. Often you can see straight away what your site is missing. For example a separate page about that one service, or a sentence saying which areas you cover.

Ask the same question in Claude and in Google's AI Mode. The answers will differ, and the same assistant may answer differently next week. So write down your questions and the results, and repeat the test after a while.

How to show up in ChatGPT without tricks

Nobody outside OpenAI knows exactly how ChatGPT picks its sources. If someone guarantees you a place in AI answers, ask how they know.

What you can influence is fairly ordinary. Search crawlers can reach your site. The site says in plain words what you do, for whom and where. Each important service has its own page. Your Google Business Profile is filled in. The same things help in regular search, so none of this is wasted.

Today, open /robots.txt on your site and look for OAI-SearchBot and Claude-SearchBot. Our free website scan will also check whether the file shuts out every crawler and whether it blocks the common AI crawlers.