How to get your brand recommended by ChatGPT

Last updated: November 6, 2026

To get your brand recommended by ChatGPT, get it named in the pages ChatGPT reads when someone asks a question in your category. With web search on, it looks the question up, opens a handful of results and repeats what they say. So the work is: find the questions your customers ask, find the pages AI reads for those questions, and earn a place in them.

If you want the mechanism first, here is how AI decides which brands to recommend. This guide is the plan that follows from it.

Step 1: start from the questions, not your brand

Nobody asks ChatGPT about a brand they have never heard of. They ask about their problem: “best running shoes for flat feet”, “which CRM is easiest for a five-person team”, “gift for someone who likes coffee”. Those are the answers you want to appear in.

• Write down ten to twenty questions a new customer asks before they know you.
• Use their words, not your marketing words. Support tickets, sales calls and reviews are the best source.
• Add one or two brand questions too (“is [your brand] any good?”), because what AI says when someone does look you up matters as well.

Step 2: see who gets named today

Ask each question in ChatGPT and Gemini, in a temporary or logged-out chat so memory does not colour the answer, and note which brands each answer names. Do it more than once: answers vary from session to session, so a single reading is a snapshot, not a verdict. The manual method is written up step by step here.

You are looking for a pattern. Which competitors keep coming up? Which questions do you never appear in? Those questions are where to focus.

Step 3: find the pages AI reads for those questions

Under most answers, ChatGPT and Gemini list the sources they used. Open them. For a product question they are usually a mix of:

• “Best X for Y” roundups on publications and niche blogs
• Review and comparison sites for your category
• Reddit and forum threads where people ask for recommendations
• Retailer and marketplace pages
• Brand sites, including your competitors’

Community pages carry real weight here. Ahrefs’ analysis of the most-cited domains in ChatGPT found Reddit alone taking about 16.7% of citations.

That list is what we call a citation gap: a page AI cites for a competitor but has not cited for you. Work through them most-cited first.

Step 4: earn a place in those pages

Roundups and review articles

Most roundups are updated, and the people who write them want good products to include. Write to the author or editor with a short, specific note: what your product is, who it suits, how it differs from what they already list, and an offer of a sample or a trial. One relevant pitch beats twenty generic ones.

Review platforms

If review sites show up in your sources, make sure you have a complete profile there and ask real customers to leave honest reviews. Do not buy or script them: platforms remove fake reviews, and an AI that reads them repeats whatever they say.

Reddit and forums

Answer questions in your category as yourself, say who you are, and be useful whether or not you mention your product. Communities remove promotion quickly, and a thread where your brand was called out for spam is a thread AI can quote.

Step 5: make your own site easy to read and quote

Your site is rarely the only page AI reads, but it is the one you control, and it is often what an assistant reads to describe you.

• Say plainly what you sell and who it is for, near the top of the page, in words a customer would use.
• Answer the common questions on the page: price, sizes, who it is not for, how it compares. A clear direct answer is easier to quote than a slogan.
• Make sure search engines can index it, in both Google and Bing. AI search starts from a web search, and a page that is not indexed cannot be read.
• Keep facts consistent across your site, marketplaces and profiles, so every page an assistant reads tells the same story.

Step 6: measure over weeks, not days

The answers change when the pages change, and earning a place in a roundup or a thread takes time. Re-ask the same questions on a regular schedule and track how often you are named compared with your competitors. If a page you worked on starts being cited when your brand is named, that is the clearest sign the work landed.

An honest limit: we can see which pages an assistant cited and who it cited them for. Nobody outside OpenAI or Google can see exactly how they weigh each page, so treat any promise of a guaranteed recommendation with suspicion.

Common questions