How do I check whether ChatGPT recommends my business?

ChatGPT discovers websites through OAI-SearchBot, a crawler you control with your robots.txt file. Search ChatGPT for the topics your business serves to see if you appear in its answers. If you don't, allow OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt, publish high-quality answers to customer questions, and search again after 24 hours.

How ChatGPT finds websites

ChatGPT discovers websites through OAI-SearchBot, a web crawler. You control whether it can access your site through your robots.txt file, the same file search engines use.

To help ensure your site appears in search results, allow OAI-SearchBot in your site's robots.txt file and allow requests from OpenAI's published IP ranges.

If you block OAI-SearchBot, your site will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it may still appear as a navigational link.

Check if ChatGPT already recommends you

Search ChatGPT for the questions and topics your customers care about. Ask it the same things your customers ask you. If ChatGPT quotes or links your site in its answer, you are already appearing.

If you don't see your site, several things could be true:

• Your robots.txt blocks OAI-SearchBot
• ChatGPT hasn't crawled your site yet
• Other sites have better answers to the questions people ask
• Your site doesn't address those questions

Steps to appear in ChatGPT

1. Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt

If your robots.txt file blocks OAI-SearchBot, edit it to allow requests from OpenAI's published IP ranges. It can take approximately 24 hours from a site's robots.txt update for systems to adjust.

1. Publish answers to customer questions

Write articles that directly and thoroughly answer the questions your customers ask. Be clear. Link to credible sources.

There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary. Quality content is what matters.

1. Improve your answer quality

ChatGPT chooses which sources to quote based on answer quality. The better your answer, the more likely ChatGPT will recommend it.

Automating content at scale

If you publish many customer-facing answers, automating the process saves time. Ownbox offers a machine that writes articles answering customer questions and publishes them to your website. Each article starts with a short answer AI assistants quote, and is checked against your facts and sources before publishing.

Next step

Ownbox is a Shared Company Brain where people and agents work side by side from the same business context: ownbox.io/brain.