Insights · GEO
How do I get my business listed on ChatGPT?
By Josh Redecop · Published
There is no sign-up form for ChatGPT's answers. OpenAI runs shopping feeds for retail merchants and labelled ads below the answer. Being named in the answer itself depends on letting OAI-SearchBot read your site, and on what your pages and independent sources say about you.
“Listed on ChatGPT” can mean three things. OpenAI runs a shopping product feed for merchants. It runs ads. And it writes answers that name some companies and leave others out. Only the third puts your company inside the reply a buyer reads, so that is where a B2B SaaS company or a building-product manufacturer should spend its effort.
Can I register my business with ChatGPT?
There is no registration for the answer itself. OpenAI runs two programs a company can join, and neither places you in the organic reply.
| Route | What it is | Who it’s built for | Puts you in the answer? | What it takes to enter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopping product feed | Merchants apply at chatgpt.com/merchants to share a product feed built on the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Shopify and Etsy catalogues are already integrated with no application. | Retail shoppers. Shopping is currently live for ChatGPT users in the U.S. | Shows retail products in shopping results | An application, or an existing Shopify or Etsy catalogue. OpenAI says a self-serve merchant platform is planned. |
| Ads | Paid campaigns with ad groups and a Measurement Pixel | Advertisers | No. Ads sit at the bottom of the answer, labelled. | An ad budget and an account |
| The answer | ChatGPT search reads the web through OAI-SearchBot and names the companies its sources support | Any company | Yes, when the sources back you | No application. A readable site and outside pages that corroborate it. |
The shopping route fits retail goods with a cart and a checkout. A SaaS subscription doesn’t fit it. Neither does a truss, a precast panel or a roofing product sold through dealers to contractors. If your buyer books a demo or asks for a quote, a product feed has nothing to carry.
Can I advertise my business on ChatGPT?
Yes. OpenAI’s developer documentation describes ChatGPT ad campaigns, ad groups and a Measurement Pixel.
OpenAI’s help centre sets the limits. Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. They run on separate systems from the chat model. Advertisers cannot shape, rank or alter responses. Ads are clearly labelled.
OpenAI’s announcement said ads would sit at the bottom of answers, separated from the organic answer. Its help centre now says ads appear below a ChatGPT response. So an ad buys a labelled box under the reply. When a buyer asks for the best tools in your category and ChatGPT lists five companies, an ad will not add you to those five.
We haven’t confirmed which countries the ads program is open to today. Check OpenAI’s documentation before you budget for it.
How does ChatGPT find a business?
When ChatGPT searches the web, it uses OpenAI’s crawler, OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. They can still appear as navigational links.
GPTBot is a separate crawler that controls training. You can block it and still allow OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says a robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to apply.
Read your robots.txt first. In a sweep of 65 building-product sites, Geongyn found 5 whose robots.txt disallows AI crawlers. One of those five is named in AI answers anyway. It publishes an llms.txt file while telling three of the four engines we checked not to read the site. Find out who wrote those rules, and whether anyone meant to.
Bing may matter too. When Geongyn interviewed the engines on 28 October 2026, ChatGPT told us its search leans on Bing. That is self-report, and we haven’t confirmed it from OpenAI’s documentation. Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools and submitting your sitemap is a small job either way.
Crawler access lets ChatGPT read your site. What the pages say decides whether it names you.
How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my company?
It depends on your own pages and on what other sites say about you.
Your own pages need to state plainly what you are and who you serve. Put one sentence near the top of the home page, in the words a buyer would type. “Scheduling software for multi-location physiotherapy clinics” gives a model something to repeat. “Empowering teams to do more” could describe any company.
Independent sources then have to say the same thing: category roundups, directories, review sites, trade coverage and community threads. If your site makes a claim and no outside page backs it, ChatGPT has little reason to put you in a list.
For a B2B SaaS company, the pages to publish usually look like this:
- A plain “what it is and who it’s for” sentence on the home page, reused in every listing.
- A public pricing page that loads without JavaScript, so a crawler can read the plans.
- Honest “[competitor] alternatives” pages and “[A] vs [B]” comparison pages that say where you fit and where you don’t.
- G2 and Capterra listings that use the same name, category and description as your site.
Geongyn has no scan data on SaaS companies yet, so treat that list as advice. GEO for SaaS covers the work in more detail.
What does this look like for building-product manufacturers?
We measured it. The Ontario Building Products AI Visibility Index scored 37 Ontario building-product manufacturers out of 100 on six weighted dimensions. Scans ran from 28 July to 13 September 2026. Every company is anonymised.
| Dimension | Weight | What we found |
|---|---|---|
| AI answer presence | 30 | 19 reliably named, 13 named only on narrow or regional queries, 5 effectively absent |
| Cited-source presence | 20 | Averaged 59.6% of its weight. Most appear in trade directories, often thinly. |
| Review signal | 20 | Weakest dimension at 42.0% of its weight. 21 of 37 scored under half. |
| Site readability | 15 | Averaged 48.1% of its weight |
| Entity consistency | 10 | Strongest dimension at 75.1% of its weight |
| Freshness | 5 | Averaged 60.5% of its weight, often self-contradicting |
Nobody scored above 74. The median was 55 and the range ran from 27 to 74. Only 7 of 37 reached the top band of 60 to 74.
The 13 narrow companies are the clearest gap. AI engines named them when the question included their own town or their branded product line. They were absent from the broad category question, and the broad question decides the shortlist.
Site readability held many back. Specification data sat in PDFs and images of tables, which a text crawler can’t read.
Manufacturers that sell through dealers rarely collect reviews in their own name. The buyer reviews the dealer. More on that pattern in why AI doesn’t recommend your products.
How can I check where my company stands today?
- Write down the question your buyer would type. Leave your company name out of it.
- Open a fresh chat in ChatGPT and ask it. Do this a few times, since answers vary between runs.
- Note whether you are named, and which competitors are.
- Ask ChatGPT which sources it used for the answer.
- Repeat on Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Mode if you have time.
The cited pages are your list: the roundups, directories and threads ChatGPT trusted for your category. Get listed on them, using the same description as your site.
Geongyn, Bayham (Vienna), Ontario, Canada, runs this check and fixes what it finds for B2B SaaS companies and building-product manufacturers. Book a teardown.