How to Get Your Business on ChatGPT: Every Real Route, and the Ones That Don’t Exist

You can’t submit a business to ChatGPT, and there is no ChatGPT business listing to claim. Your business gets onto ChatGPT through five routes: ChatGPT search reading your website (allow OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot), mentions on the third-party pages it reads (directories, reviews, “best of” lists), product feeds for shopping (approved merchants), an app in ChatGPT’s directory (software and services) and ads (paid, and separate from the answers). For most businesses, the first two are the whole job.

Route 1: let ChatGPT search read your website

ChatGPT searches when a question needs current information. OpenAI says it rewrites the question into queries for search providers, one of which is its own index, built by a crawler called OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI is explicit that sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers. So the first job is technical and takes ten minutes:

1. Check robots.txt for a rule that blocks OAI-SearchBot, or a blanket rule that blocks every bot. GPTBot is OpenAI’s training crawler and a separate decision; blocking it doesn’t remove you from search (GPTBot vs OAI-SearchBot).
2. Check your firewall or CDN. A robots.txt allow doesn’t help if Cloudflare or a bot challenge turns the crawler away; in our study of the top 5,000 sites, many sites that allowed AI crawlers in robots.txt still refused them at the edge.
3. Make sure your key facts are in the page HTML, not loaded by JavaScript: what you do, where, prices, hours, contact details.

OpenAI says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to reach its search systems. Our [free audit](/) checks all three for OAI-SearchBot and the other AI crawlers.

Route 2: be on the pages ChatGPT reads

When someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a business, it recommends the businesses named on the pages it retrieves. Ahrefs found that “best X” lists made up 43.8% of the page types ChatGPT cited for recommendation-style prompts (vendor study). Directories, review sites and news coverage make up much of the rest. Local data now has its own channel too: Yelp licenses its reviews and business data to OpenAI, so an accurate Yelp profile reaches ChatGPT even though Yelp’s robots.txt closes business pages to its crawler.

This route is where recommendations are won, and it has its own guides: how to get ChatGPT to recommend your business, how to get on the “best of” lists AI cites and, for shops, cafés and clinics, getting a local business recommended by AI.

Route 3: product feeds for ChatGPT shopping

If you sell products online, OpenAI accepts product feeds through its Agentic Commerce Protocol. Its developer docs say onboarding product feeds “is currently available to approved partners”, with an application at chatgpt.com/merchants. Since March 2026, OpenAI has used the same feeds for product discovery and lets merchants keep their own checkout, and Shopify merchants are connected through Shopify Catalog. The full walkthrough, including Google’s equivalent for AI Mode, is in getting products into ChatGPT shopping and Google AI Mode.

Route 4: an app in ChatGPT’s directory

Software companies and services people can use inside a conversation (booking, quotes, search over your own data) can build an app and submit it. OpenAI opened submissions to its app directory on 17 December 2025. Its submission docs, which now call these plugins for ChatGPT and Codex, require a verified individual or business publisher, a public HTTPS endpoint for the app’s MCP server, privacy policy, support and terms links, and test cases for a human review. It’s a product, not a listing: worth it if people would genuinely use your service inside ChatGPT, and a poor fit for a business that only wants to be found.

Route 5: ads

OpenAI announced its approach to advertising in January 2026, and ads are shown apart from the answer. That separation is the point to understand: an ad can put your business in front of someone asking a related question, but it doesn’t change who ChatGPT recommends in the answer, and it isn’t available in every country or plan. Treat it like any paid channel and measure it separately.

Routes that don’t exist

• A form to submit your website or business to ChatGPT.
• A ChatGPT business profile you can claim, like Google Business Profile.
• Paid placement inside ChatGPT’s answers.
• An llms.txt file that ChatGPT reads to list you. There’s no evidence any major assistant uses it this way (GEO myths, graded).
• Anyone who can guarantee you’ll be recommended. Answers change from run to run.

How to check you’re on ChatGPT

Ask ChatGPT, in a temporary chat, “What is [your business]?” and the question a new customer would ask, three times each. If the answers search and cite your site, route 1 is working. If you’re named for category questions, route 2 is. The full question set and scoring sheet are in what AI says about your business; visits from ChatGPT arrive tagged utm_source=chatgpt.com (what it means).