Short answer: there is no form to submit. ChatGPT recommends businesses it can find and trust: ones its search can reach, described the same way across Google, directories and review sites, and with pages that answer customer questions plainly. Start by asking ChatGPT what your customers would ask, and note who it names.

More customers now ask an assistant (“which dentist near me does Saturday appointments?”) instead of typing a few words into Google. The good news for a small business is that the work that gets you into those answers is mostly the same work that gets you found in search. Nothing in this guide requires special tools or a big budget.

Start with a 10-minute test

Before changing anything, find out where you stand.

Open ChatGPT (with search on), Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity and Google, and use each one logged out or in a private window.
Ask five questions your customers would really ask, in their words. Mix the types:
- “best [your service] in [your town]”
- “who can [specific job] in [area] at the weekend?”
- “how much does [your service] cost in [town]?”
- “is [your business name] any good?”
- “[your business name] opening hours”
Write down, for each answer: are you mentioned, is the information correct, and which sources are linked.
Repeat the same questions once a month and compare.

The sources column is the useful one. If the assistant keeps citing one directory, a review site or a competitor’s page that answers the question better than yours, that tells you where to work.

Step 1: make sure AI search can reach your site

Assistants that search the web need to be allowed to read your pages.

Check robots.txt. OpenAI’s crawler for ChatGPT search is called OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says sites that block it “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”, apart from navigational links. Its training crawler, GPTBot, is separate: you can block training and still allow search.
Check your firewall or CDN. Some security settings block unfamiliar bots by default. If your host or Cloudflare has a “block AI bots” switch, know what it’s set to and decide on purpose.

Step 2: get indexed in Bing as well as Google

OpenAI says ChatGPT search uses third-party search providers alongside its own crawler, without publishing the full list. Microsoft Copilot runs on Bing. Being properly indexed in Bing is therefore a cheap, sensible step, and plenty of small sites never do it.

Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools. You can import it from Google Search Console in a few clicks.
Submit your XML sitemap there.
Use IndexNow if your site or host supports it. It tells Bing and other participating search engines the moment a page changes. We ping it on every deploy of b63.eu. Google doesn’t use IndexNow, so keep your Google sitemap too.

If your site isn’t showing in ordinary Google results either, fix that first: see why a website doesn’t show up on Google.

Step 3: tell the same story everywhere

Assistants cross-check. If your website says you open at 8, Google says 9 and a directory has your old address, you look unreliable.

Google Business Profile: verified, with the right categories, services, hours, area and photos.
Directories and review sites that matter in your trade and country: the same name, address, phone and description everywhere.
Your website: the same facts, in plain text on the page, not only inside an image.
Link them up. On your site, structured data can list your official profiles (the sameAs property). We list our Clutch, Trustpilot and other directory profiles this way on b63.eu.

Step 4: earn reviews and mentions on other sites

Assistants lean on what other people say about you, not just what you say about yourself. That means:

reviews on Google and on the review sites your customers use, with replies from you
listings in trade bodies, local business associations and chambers of commerce you genuinely belong to
mentions in local news, supplier pages or partner sites

You can’t fake this part, and you shouldn’t try: buying reviews breaks consumer law in the EU and UK and the platforms’ rules. Asking happy customers, every time, works.

Step 5: write pages that answer questions directly

When an assistant builds an answer, it looks for passages that answer the question clearly. Help it:

Put the answer first. Open each page with two or three sentences that say what you do, where, for whom and roughly what it costs.
One page per main service, with a heading that matches how people ask (“Emergency boiler repair in Leeds”, not “Solutions”).
Answer real questions on the page: prices or what a price depends on, areas covered, how long a job takes, what happens first.
Be specific. “Open Saturdays 9–1” is quotable. “Flexible hours” isn’t.

Our industry pages show this in practice, for example for dentists and therapists and counsellors, where patients ask very specific questions before they book.

Step 6: add structured data

Structured data (schema.org markup) describes your business in a machine-readable way: name, address, opening hours, services, prices, reviews. It helps search engines and assistants understand who you are and connect your website to your profiles elsewhere.

Two honest caveats. Google says there’s no special structured data needed for AI Overviews, so markup is a help, not a ticket in. And the markup must match what’s visible on the page; describing things that aren’t there does more harm than good.

Step 7: make sure the content is in the HTML

Some websites show their text only after JavaScript runs in the browser. Google can usually cope with that. Many other crawlers, including some used by AI tools, read only the HTML the server sends. If your services, prices or contact details only appear after scripts load, part of the web can’t see them.

A quick test: open your page, choose “View page source” in the browser, and search for a sentence from your main text. If it isn’t there, ask your developer about it. Every page on a B63 custom-built site is delivered as finished HTML, so this problem doesn’t arise.

What about Google’s AI Overviews?

Google’s rule is simple: to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet. Google states that there are no additional requirements and no special optimisation. So the AI Overviews checklist is the ordinary one: be indexed, be fast, answer the question well and be trusted.

What doesn’t matter much: llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed standard: a plain-text file at your site’s root that summarises your site for AI tools. It’s optional. Google says you don’t need “new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup” to appear in its AI features, and the big assistants don’t document relying on it.

We publish one on b63.eu anyway, because it costs almost nothing to generate from the same data as the website. Treat it the same way: a harmless extra once everything above is done, not a shortcut.

How B63 helps

On B63’s monthly plan (€0 upfront, then €150 per month excl. VAT for 24 months), AI search optimisation is included, together with setting up Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, your Google Business Profile and analytics. For one-time builds and existing sites, it’s priced on request. Either way we don’t promise you’ll be named by ChatGPT: nobody controls that. We make sure nothing on your site stands in the way. The technical side is described on our SEO and page speed page. What that work covers is set out on our AI search optimisation page, and the account setup on our search and analytics setup page.

FAQ

Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?

No. There’s no paid placement in ChatGPT’s organic answers. Anyone selling “guaranteed ChatGPT rankings” is selling something they can’t deliver.

How long does it take to show up in AI answers?

It depends on how quickly your pages are crawled and how much other evidence about your business exists. Getting indexed in Bing can take days to weeks; reviews and mentions build over months. Run the 10-minute test monthly to see progress.

ChatGPT gives wrong information about my business. What can I do?

Find the source it cites, which is often an outdated directory listing or an old page, and correct it there. Then make sure your own site states the correct facts plainly.

Is this different from SEO?

Mostly not. Being indexed, being consistent, being trusted and answering questions clearly is good SEO too. The main additions are Bing, allowing the right crawlers and checking what assistants say about you.

Want to know how your site looks to search engines first? Run the free website check, or ask us to look.

How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and cited in AI Overviews