How to Get Your Business Mentioned by ChatGPT
ChatGPT has rapidly become one of the most influential platforms for brand discovery. Hundreds of millions of users now ask it for product recommendations, service comparisons, and business advice — queries that previously went exclusively to Google. When ChatGPT mentions your brand in response to a relevant question, it functions as a powerful endorsement. When it does not, you are invisible to a large and growing audience.
This guide explains how ChatGPT decides which brands to mention, why some businesses appear consistently while others are overlooked, and the practical steps you can take to improve your chances of being recommended.
How ChatGPT Generates Recommendations
ChatGPT does not maintain a curated directory of businesses. Instead, it constructs its responses by drawing on two primary information sources:
Training data
ChatGPT's base knowledge comes from its training data — a vast corpus of web content, books, articles, and other text sources processed during the model's training phase. Brands that have a strong, consistent presence across this training data are more likely to be part of ChatGPT's "background knowledge" and may be recommended even without a real-time web search.
The training data has a knowledge cutoff date, meaning it does not include information published after a certain point. However, OpenAI regularly retrains and updates its models, incorporating newer data over time.
Web browsing
When ChatGPT has web browsing enabled — which is the default for ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users — it can conduct real-time web searches to supplement its training data. For recommendation queries, ChatGPT typically searches the web to find current, relevant information before generating its answer.
When browsing, ChatGPT tends to reference:
- Top-ranking search results for the relevant query
- Review and comparison sites
- Industry publications and expert sources
- Forum discussions, particularly Reddit
- Official brand websites with clear, structured information
Citation behaviour
When ChatGPT uses web browsing, it often includes citations linking to the sources it referenced. Being cited gives your brand a direct link in the conversation, increasing the likelihood that the user will visit your site. Even when ChatGPT does not include an explicit citation, the sources it browses influence which brands it mentions.
What Makes ChatGPT Mention a Brand
Several factors determine whether ChatGPT includes your brand in its recommendation responses:
Consensus across authoritative sources
ChatGPT looks for convergent evidence. If multiple independent, authoritative sources consistently mention your brand in the context of a given topic, ChatGPT is far more likely to include you in its answer. A single mention on one site is rarely enough — what matters is a pattern of mentions across diverse, credible sources.
Clarity of positioning
Brands with clear, unambiguous positioning are easier for ChatGPT to recommend. If your website, reviews, and third-party mentions all consistently describe your brand in the same way — what you do, who you serve, and what makes you different — ChatGPT can confidently slot you into the right recommendation context.
Brands with vague or inconsistent positioning are harder for ChatGPT to categorise, and it tends to default to better-defined alternatives.
Reputation and sentiment
ChatGPT is attuned to the overall sentiment around a brand. Positive reviews, favourable press coverage, and constructive community discussion all contribute to a positive recommendation. Significant negative sentiment — poor reviews, public controversies, or widespread complaints — can result in ChatGPT either omitting your brand or mentioning it with qualifications.
Relevance to the specific query
ChatGPT tailors its recommendations to the precise query. A user asking for "the best email marketing tool for Shopify stores" will get different recommendations than one asking for "the best email marketing platform for enterprise." Your content and third-party mentions need to be specific enough that ChatGPT can match your brand to the right audience and use case.
The Difference Between GPT-4 and GPT-4o Recommendations
OpenAI runs multiple model versions, and their recommendation behaviour can differ. GPT-4 tends to draw more heavily on its training data and provides more cautious, hedged recommendations. GPT-4o, with its enhanced browsing capabilities and more recent training data, tends to provide more specific and current recommendations.
This means your strategy should address both dimensions: building a strong presence in the kinds of sources that end up in training data (for GPT-4 and non-browsing contexts), and maintaining strong current web visibility (for GPT-4o and browsing-enabled conversations).
Practical Steps to Get Mentioned by ChatGPT
Build authoritative content on your website
Your website is the foundation. Ensure it has:
- Clear, specific pages describing your products or services — what they do, who they are for, and how they differ from alternatives
- Well-structured content with headings that match common question formats
- Specific data points, case studies, and concrete examples that ChatGPT can reference
- FAQ pages that directly answer the questions your target customers ask
- Schema markup (Organisation, Product, FAQ, Review) that helps AI systems understand your content
Earn coverage in respected publications
Getting your brand mentioned in established industry publications, reputable review sites, and news outlets significantly increases your ChatGPT visibility. Each mention in a trusted source is a data point that ChatGPT weighs when deciding what to recommend.
Focus on:
- Trade publications relevant to your industry
- Established review platforms (Trustpilot, G2, industry-specific review sites)
- News outlets that cover your sector
- Expert roundups and listicles on authoritative sites
Cultivate genuine reviews
Reviews on third-party platforms are a powerful signal. ChatGPT regularly references review sites when generating recommendations, and a strong review profile directly influences whether you are mentioned. Encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews, and respond constructively to negative feedback.
Optimise for the queries that matter
Create content specifically targeting the recommendation queries your potential customers use. If your target query is "best project management tool for marketing agencies," ensure you have content on your site that explicitly addresses marketing agencies as an audience, discusses the specific challenges they face, and explains how your tool solves them.
Maintain a strong presence on Reddit and forums
Reddit has an outsized influence on ChatGPT's recommendations, particularly for product and service categories. Organic mentions of your brand in relevant subreddit discussions contribute significantly to ChatGPT's understanding of your brand. This cannot be manufactured through spam or astroturfing — authentic community engagement and genuinely helpful participation are what drive value.
Invest in digital PR and thought leadership
Original research, expert commentary, and thought leadership content that gets picked up by other sources creates a compounding effect. The more your brand is referenced across diverse, credible sources, the stronger the signal to ChatGPT.
How to Check if ChatGPT Currently Mentions Your Brand
You can manually test your ChatGPT visibility by:
- Opening a new ChatGPT conversation (to avoid context from previous chats)
- Asking the recommendation questions your target customers would ask
- Noting whether your brand is mentioned, how it is described, and what competitors appear
- Repeating across different query variations and model versions
Keep in mind that ChatGPT's responses can vary between conversations, even for the same query. A single test is not definitive — you need to test multiple times to identify patterns.
For ongoing monitoring, RivalScope automatically tracks whether ChatGPT mentions your brand across your target queries, providing consistent data over time rather than one-off snapshots.
What to Do If ChatGPT Ignores Your Brand
If ChatGPT consistently fails to mention your brand for relevant queries, the issue almost always comes down to one or more of these factors:
- Insufficient third-party authority: Your brand does not appear across enough credible sources
- Weak positioning: Your brand identity is too vague for ChatGPT to recommend confidently
- Competitor dominance: Competitors have stronger and more consistent mentions across the sources ChatGPT draws from
- Limited web presence: Your content does not appear in the search results ChatGPT browses
Address each of these systematically, and your ChatGPT visibility will improve over time.