How to get recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude

1. Know how assistants choose

When a buyer asks "what's the best CRM for a small agency?", ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude usually search the web first. They read the top few results, which are mostly review sites, comparison articles, "best of" lists and forum threads, and recommend what those pages agree on.

So the answer is decided by the pages, not by the assistant. If the pages it reads name a competitor and not you, the answer will too, however good your product is.

Some assistants don't search through their APIs and answer from training data instead. They change only when they are retrained, which takes months. The searching assistants are where the work pays off first.

2. Find the questions your buyers ask

Write down the questions a buyer would type into an assistant, in their words, not yours:

• "best [category] for [who you serve]"
• "[competitor] alternatives" and "[competitor] vs [you]"
• the problem before the product: "how do I [job your product does]"
• for a local business: "best [service] in [town]" and "[service] near me"

These are the questions to win. A free citecheck audit writes them from your website and asks them for you.

3. See where you stand

Ask each question more than once. Assistants rarely answer the same way twice, so one try tells you little. Note whether you are named, whether you are the first pick, and who is named instead.

Then look at the pages the answers cite. That list is your to-do list: every page that names a competitor and not you is a page to get onto.

4. Get onto the pages assistants read

This is where most of the gain is. For each page that the answers lean on:

• Lists and directories: ask to be added to the "best of" articles, alternatives sites and directories in your category. Many take submissions.
• Review sites: ask real customers to review you on the sites that rank for your category.
• Comparison articles: offer the author accurate facts, prices and screenshots. Writers update pages that are easy to update.
• Communities: take part honestly where your buyers ask for recommendations, such as Reddit and industry forums. Assistants read those threads.

5. Make your own site easy to quote

Assistants quote pages that answer the question directly. On your own site:

• Say what you are, who it's for and what it costs in plain sentences near the top of the home page.
• Publish the pages buyers search for: comparisons with named competitors, an alternatives page, a pricing page in text rather than images, and an FAQ that answers each question in its first sentence.
• Use the same name, category and description everywhere, so every page an assistant reads agrees about what you are.
• Add structured data (schema.org) for your organization, product and FAQ.

6. Let AI crawlers in

An assistant can't quote a page it isn't allowed to read. Check that your robots.txt doesn't block the AI crawlers, such as GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), Google-Extended (Google's AI) and PerplexityBot.

If your site is behind Cloudflare or another CDN, check its bot settings too: a "block AI bots" switch overrides robots.txt and turns those crawlers away at the edge.

7. Be in the search indexes they use

Assistants search through search engines. Gemini searches Google. ChatGPT's search leans on Bing, so a site that ranks on Google can still be invisible to it. Submit your sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools as well as Google Search Console.

8. Measure, then measure again

Changes to third-party pages and indexes take weeks to show up in answers. Re-run the same questions on a schedule and watch the trend per assistant, not one answer. citecheck's paid plans track your questions over time, asking each one five times per run, and alert you when a competitor overtakes you. How it works explains how the score is calculated.