How to get your product recommended by ChatGPT

You cannot pay or prompt your way into a ChatGPT recommendation. You can make your product easy to find, easy to understand and easy to verify. That is the whole job. Here are the five steps, in the order we would do them.

1. Let the crawler in

OpenAI documents a search crawler called OAI-SearchBot. If your robots.txt or firewall blocks it, your pages will not show up in ChatGPT search results. It is a separate setting from GPTBot, which relates to training. Check robots.txt, check your CDN or bot-protection rules, and make sure the pages you want cited load publicly without a login. Keep a clean XML sitemap while you are there.

2. Publish pages that answer the question people ask

People ask ChatGPT things like "what is the best invoicing tool for UK freelancers" or "[competitor] alternative for small teams". Write the page that answers that question directly. Say who the product is for, what it costs, what it does, and where it is a poor fit. Specific beats long. A tight page with real detail is more useful to a model, and to a reader, than a padded article.

Good starting pages: a comparison against the tool people already name, a "best for [use case]" page, a clear pricing page, and a plain explanation of what the product is. Add Product or FAQ schema where it fits, so the facts are machine-readable.

3. Make your facts identical everywhere

The engines cross-check. If your homepage says one thing, your directory listing says another and your pricing page says a third, you give them a reason to skip you. Pick one name, one category and one description. Use it on your site, your directory profiles, your LinkedIn company page and, if you qualify, Wikidata.

4. Earn mentions you did not write

Answers lean on third-party sources. In the recorded answers behind this page, the engines pointed to review sites such as G2, Trustpilot and Capterra, to Reddit and Quora threads, and to roundup and comparison articles. So claim your listings, ask real customers for honest reviews, answer questions in threads where your product is genuinely the right answer, and pitch the roundups in your category. Never fake a review or astroturf a thread. It is against the rules and it is easy to spot.

5. Check the answers yourself

Once a month, ask ChatGPT with web search the questions your customers ask. Vary the need, the budget and the competitor. Write down whether you are named, which sources are cited and whether the description is right. OpenAI documents a utm_source=chatgpt.com referral parameter, so you can also look for it in your analytics. Then fix the gap that shows up and ask again.

Do it without the spreadsheet

AfterLaunch reads your site, asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews your customers' questions, and shows where you are absent. Then it ranks the next moves and drafts them in your voice. Free scan, no card.