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How to Get Your Business Cited by ChatGPT

AI search
The Short Answer

To get cited by ChatGPT, let OpenAI's crawler read your site, answer real questions plainly and describe your business the same way everywhere. We measured our own site across four AI engines: cited 8 times in 8 on brand questions, once in 38 on everything else.

On 29 September 2026 we set an AI agent a job: put the same 12 questions to Google's AI Overview, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Bing Copilot, and record every answer and every source cited. Two questions named The Morning Beer. Ten were the kind of thing a buyer asks before they have heard of anyone: agencies in Ahmedabad, a free tool to check marketing copy, the difference between an "AI-powered" agency and one with real AI infrastructure.

The engines cited us 8 times in 8 when asked about us by name. For everything else, they cited us once in 38 answers. Everything below is what that measurement taught us, and what we changed.

How does ChatGPT choose which sites to cite?

ChatGPT cites pages it can find through search, and it can only find what its crawler is allowed to read. OpenAI runs three crawlers with different jobs. OAI-SearchBot is "used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features", and sites that block it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers". GPTBot collects training data; blocking it says your content shouldn't be used for training. ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a person asks ChatGPT to look at it (OpenAI).

OpenAI also says ChatGPT search "leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by our partners" (OpenAI Help Center). So being well indexed by ordinary search engines still matters, even for answers written by an AI.

What did our measurement show?

Five things, and only the first was good news:

  1. Engines knew who we were. All four described us correctly as an AI-native marketing agency with its own lab.
  2. The one non-brand citation was a tool, not an article. Bing Copilot answered "is there a free tool that checks whether my copy is boring" with our Boring Marketing Detector first.
  3. Broad how-to questions (SEO vs PPC, how long AI automation takes to pay off, brand voice vs tone, common marketing mistakes) went to Google's own pages, the US Small Business Administration, HubSpot, McKinsey, Semrush and Reddit. We had a post on each and were cited in none.
  4. Local questions went to local agencies, Clutch and other directories. Our site didn't say where we work, so there was nothing to find.
  5. Engines leaned on LinkedIn: it showed up in 12 of the captures, our own site in 9. Seven captures also leaked a similar name into the answer, such as Morning Brew or Marketing Brew.

One caution about our own method: the agent ran the questions in signed-in browser sessions, which can flatter a brand's results. The next run happens in a private window, signed out.

What did we change?

The fixes were unglamorous, which is the point:

  1. One H1 per page. A hidden block in the page template had been giving every page a second one.
  2. FAQ answers written into the page's HTML. They had been hidden in closed panels, invisible to anything that didn't click.
  3. One structured-data graph that ties together the company, the founder, every service and every post, so each page states who it belongs to.
  4. Service pages that open with the question a buyer asks, answered in about fifty words.
  5. The same description of the business everywhere: "an AI-native marketing and branding agency with its own AI lab", plus where we work and who owns the company.
  6. Free tools that actually run on the page, since a tool was the one thing an engine chose to cite.
  7. Blog titles rewritten in the words people type, like the title of this post.

How do you get your business cited by ChatGPT?

From our measurement and OpenAI's documentation, in order:

  1. Make sure your robots.txt doesn't block OAI-SearchBot, Bingbot or Googlebot, and that your key pages are indexed.
  2. Pick the questions you want to be the answer to, and give each a page that answers it in the first two or three sentences.
  3. Say where your facts come from, with links.
  4. Describe your business in exactly the same words on your site, your LinkedIn page, Google, directories and your structured data.
  5. Make something worth citing: a free tool, original data or a real example. Engines passed over our articles and picked our tool.
  6. Measure every month with the same questions, signed out, and write down who gets cited when you don't.

How long does it take?

We don't know yet, and we are wary of anyone who says they do. Engines recrawl on their own schedules. Our next measurement is due around 29 October 2026, a month after the changes. This post will be updated with those numbers, whatever they are.

Questions

Does blocking GPTBot stop ChatGPT citing my site?

No. OpenAI uses GPTBot for training data and OAI-SearchBot for search. Blocking GPTBot tells OpenAI not to train on your content; blocking OAI-SearchBot is what keeps you out of ChatGPT search answers.

How can I check whether ChatGPT cites my business?

Write down ten questions your buyers ask, without your name in them. Put them to ChatGPT with search on, in a signed-out or temporary session, and record whether you are mentioned, whether you are linked, and who is cited instead. Repeat monthly with the same questions.

Why does ChatGPT cite LinkedIn instead of my website?

In our run, LinkedIn appeared more often than our own site. Engines lean on well-known platforms when a smaller site is thin or unclear. Keep your LinkedIn company page complete and worded like your website, and make your own pages answer the question more directly than any profile can.

Related

Written By

Vishal Gupta

Founder of The Morning Beer. Before it, he ran the whole marketing operation in-house at a global recruitment-tech company, reaching 50,000+ recruitment professionals, after a decade in marketing in Switzerland, Egypt and India, including AI for Good work in Geneva.