Guides

How to get found on ChatGPT and Gemini

By Ashton Foran, director. Published 9th September 2026.

ChatGPT looks things up on Bing. Gemini and the AI answers at the top of Google use Google's own index. Perplexity runs its own crawler and leans on Bing too. Getting named by an assistant means being in those indexes, on pages a machine can read, with your services and your area written in plain sentences. There is no AI directory to join and no form to fill in.

People ask us how to get their business "onto ChatGPT" the way you would ask about getting onto a listings site. It does not work like that. The assistant runs a search, reads what comes back, and writes an answer out of it.

How an assistant decides who to name

It searches, it reads the top few pages, and it repeats what those pages say.

That means the answer a customer sees is built out of your own words, if your words are the ones it found. Your services page becomes the description. Your area pages become the list of places you cover. A price you published becomes the price it quotes.

It also means the old question has not changed much. Can it find you, and can it read you.

Can the AI crawlers reach your site at all?

This is the one worth checking, and almost nobody does.

Some hosting companies block AI crawlers at the server, before your website gets a say in it. Your site can invite them in and it changes nothing, because the request never arrives. Nothing appears in your reports. Nothing tells you.

We check it on every site we look after, and we have found hosts doing it. In the cases we have seen, the crawler being turned away is the training one, while the crawlers that matter for being named in an answer come through, along with Google and Bing.

Worth knowing the difference before anyone panics about it. Training crawlers decide whether your pages help build the model. Search crawlers decide whether you get quoted this afternoon.

If you want to know where your own site stands, ask whoever hosts it whether GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot or ChatGPT-User are blocked at server level. It is a two minute answer for them and most owners have never thought to ask.

What about Gemini and the AI answers on Google?

Same index as ordinary Google search. There is nothing separate to sign up to, which is the good news and the bad news.

The good news is that the work is the work you already know: a filled-in Business Profile, reviews, pages that answer real questions. The bad news is that if you are on page four for something, no AI answer is going to quote you for it either.

One thing that confuses people: the Google-Extended setting controls whether Google can use your pages for training. It has no say over whether you turn up in an AI answer. Blocking it will not take you out of them, and allowing it will not put you in.

Does an llms.txt file help?

We publish one and we would not sell you on it.

It is a plain text file that describes a site for language models. Google has said it ignores it, and we have seen nothing to suggest it moves anything. It costs a few minutes and it might matter later. Anyone charging you for one is charging for a few minutes.

What actually got one business named

One of our clients installs satellite and broadband systems across a spread of towns. Asked, in a signed-out chat, who could help with an installation in his part of the country, ChatGPT named him first and described him using sentences lifted straight off his own site. A second answer listed the towns he covers, which exist on his site as a page each.

Other installers appear further down that answer. We do not know whether anyone rang him off the back of it. What it shows is the mechanism: the assistant had read his pages, and it had something specific to repeat.

The reason it had something to repeat is that the site says what he does, where he does it, and what it costs, in words rather than inside a graphic.

How long does this take?

Weeks before anything shows, months before it settles.

In our experience an assistant starts naming a business at somewhere around two to three months, and gets dependable about it at six or more. It is never guaranteed, because the answer is rewritten every time somebody asks. Anyone selling you a faster number is guessing with your money.

Five things worth doing this week

1. Ask your host whether AI crawlers are blocked at server level.
2. Claim Bing Webmaster Tools and Bing Places. ChatGPT searches Bing, and Bing Places imports from your Google profile in about ten minutes.
3. Write your towns and services into your pages as sentences a person would say out loud.
4. Move any prices, service lists or contact details that only exist inside an image into real text.
5. Keep asking for reviews. They feed the local results the assistants read.

Four of those five are the same things that get you found on Google, which is the honest summary of this whole subject. Our guide on getting found on Google covers the rest of that groundwork, and the satellite installer above is the one with a page for every town he covers.