How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT and other AI assistants?
To get your business recommended by ChatGPT and other AI assistants, make it easy for them to find, understand and trust you: give each product or service its own clear page, keep that page crawlable and indexed by search engines, answer the real questions buyers ask, and earn mentions on other reputable sites in your niche. There's no secret file or trick; AI assistants mostly reward the same clarity and credibility that search engines do.
How AI assistants decide what to recommend
When someone asks an AI assistant "what's the best book on X" or "which agency should I use for Y", the assistant draws on a mix of what it learned in training and, increasingly, live web search results. In practice that means three things matter:
- Can it find you? Your pages need to be crawlable and indexed.
- Can it understand you? Each page needs to say plainly what you sell, who it's for and what it costs.
- Does anyone else vouch for you? Mentions on independent sites make an assistant more confident recommending you.
Google's own guidance is blunt on the first two: there are no special requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a normal search snippet, and no special AI files or schema you must add.
1. One subject per page
A catalogue page listing twelve products rarely gets quoted. A page about one product, on its own address, often does. For each product or service, publish a page with:
- a plain-language description of what it is,
- a clear price, matching what buyers actually pay at checkout,
- what's included,
- who it's for, and who it isn't for,
- who is behind it,
- a set of real questions and answers.
This is the kind of page both search engines and AI assistants can lift a confident answer from.
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2. Make sure search engines can read and index it
The unglamorous basics matter most:
- Allow crawling in robots.txt and at your hosting or CDN level.
- Keep important content as text, not only inside images or videos.
- Link to each product page from the rest of your site.
- Publish an XML sitemap and keep it up to date.
- Verify your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and fix any errors they report.
Several assistants rely on search engines other than Google, so don't ignore Bing. The IndexNow protocol lets you notify participating search engines, including Bing, the moment you publish or update a page, rather than waiting to be recrawled.
3. Add structured data that matches the page
Structured data (schema.org markup for products, offers, organisations and FAQs) helps search engines understand a page without guessing. Google notes that it must match the visible text. It won't magically get you recommended, but it removes ambiguity about what you sell and at what price.
Some sites also publish an `llms.txt` file, a proposed plain-text summary written for language models. It's cheap to add and may help some tools, but treat it as optional: Google says you don't need AI-specific files to appear in its AI features.
4. Answer the questions buyers actually ask
People ask assistants questions, so publish answers. A steady stream of genuinely useful articles, each answering one real question your buyers type, gives assistants something specific to cite and gives buyers a path to your product. Good rules:
- Title each article with the question.
- Answer it directly in the first two or three sentences.
- Back facts and figures with reputable sources, and never invent statistics.
- Don't publish near-duplicates or thin pages; quality beats volume.
Video counts too. YouTube is a major search engine in its own right, and clear, useful videos on your topic add more places for people and tools to find you.
5. Earn mentions on other sites
What other people say about you is often what tips an assistant into recommending you. Useful places to be mentioned:
- "best books" or "best tools" round-ups in your niche,
- resource pages and directories that accept suggestions,
- newsletters and podcasts that cover your topic.
Pitch honestly and selectively: one relevant site at a time, through the contact route the site itself publishes, with a short note explaining why your product fits their specific page. Never buy links, join link schemes or post spam comments; that can damage your search visibility, which is the opposite of what you want.
6. Test what assistants say about you
Every month or so, ask a few AI assistants the questions your buyers would ask, such as "best book on getting your first customers". Note:
- whether you're mentioned,
- which competitors are,
- what those competitors' pages and mentions have that yours don't.
Then close the gaps one at a time.
Key takeaways
- There's no shortcut file; clarity and credibility do the work.
- Give every product one clear page with price, contents, audience and FAQs.
- Make sure Google and Bing can crawl and index it, and ping changes with IndexNow.
- Use structured data that matches the page; treat llms.txt as optional.
- Publish genuine answers to real buyer questions.
- Earn honest mentions on relevant sites, and never buy links.
How Asendify Makes Its Money explains how this fits into a whole business model, alongside the agency, books, software, pricing and the systems that run it without a large team, with a 30-day plan for building your own version. It shares the mechanisms, not revenue figures, and nothing in it promises income.
FAQ
Does ChatGPT use Google or Bing results?
AI assistants use different search providers and partners, and these can change. That's why it makes sense to be properly indexed in both Google and Bing rather than optimising for one.
Do I need an llms.txt file to be recommended by AI?
No. It's an optional proposal some tools may read. Google says you don't need AI-specific files or markup to appear in its AI features; clear, indexed pages matter far more.
How long does it take to start getting recommended by AI assistants?
It varies. New pages can be indexed within days, but outside mentions and a body of useful content usually build up over months. Check regularly and keep improving the pages buyers are most likely to be pointed to.
More playbooks on other topics: https://www.asendify.co/books/
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