How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?

OpenAI runs four crawlers and they do different jobs. GPTBot collects training data. OAI-SearchBot is the one that surfaces sites inside ChatGPT search. ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a person asks about it, and OpenAI states it "is not used to crawl the web in an automatic fashion". OAI-AdsBot validates pages submitted as ads.

They are separate tokens in robots.txt, which means these are separate decisions. OpenAI spells this out: "a webmaster can allow OAI-SearchBot in order to appear in search results while disallowing GPTBot." So you can decline to feed the training set and still be findable. Most robots.txt files I audit have never made that distinction, and a few block all of it by accident.

On the first lever, OpenAI's own wording is "To help ensure your site appears in search results, we recommend allowing OAI-SearchBot in your site's robots.txt file." That is the whole documented instruction. Read 14 August 2026.

The second lever is that the sentence has to exist in the HTML the crawler receives. OpenAI's documentation says nothing about whether any of its bots execute JavaScript. Not one word, in any direction. I went through it line by line for this piece, where I also traced where the industry's confident claim comes from.

Here is what nobody can tell you, including me. OpenAI publishes no ranking factors for ChatGPT search. There is no documented list of things that make it pick you over someone else. Anyone selling you the formula has reverse-engineered a guess, and the honest move is to say so.

What is left is a short list. Be crawlable by the right bot, be readable without JavaScript, and be corroborated somewhere other than your own site, because a claim that appears only on the page making it is the weakest kind of evidence there is.