How to rank in ChatGPT and get your startup recommended

Before changing anything, write down the questions your buyers actually ask. Aim for 10 to 20 prompts in four groups. Here's what that looks like for Corvella, a fictional invoicing tool for design agencies:

Run each prompt in a temporary chat, so your own history and memory don't shape the answer, and run the important ones more than once. Then note four things for every answer:

• Are you mentioned at all?
• If the answer is a list, what position are you in?
• Which sources does it cite?
• Which competitors does it name instead?

The sources are the most useful part. They show exactly which pages shape the answer for your category. Doing this by hand across several assistants is slow, so the free scan below runs a structured version for you. The ChatGPT visibility checker page explains exactly how the ChatGPT check works.

ChatGPT can only recommend you for a category if it's confident you belong in it. Clever positioning ("the operating system for modern teams") makes that hard. Fix the basics on your own site first:

• Write one plain sentence that names your category and audience, and use it everywhere: homepage, About page, social bios and directory listings. For example: "Corvella is invoicing software for design agencies."
• Put it where machines look first. Your homepage title, H1 and meta description should name what you sell in plain words.
• Publish a real About page covering what you do, who it's for, when you started, where you're based and how pricing works.
• Add Organization structured data (schema.org/Organization (opens in a new tab)) with your name, URL, logo, description and sameAs links to your LinkedIn, Crunchbase, GitHub or marketplace profiles.
• Clean up old descriptions. If you've pivoted, update every profile that still describes the old product. AI answers can repeat stale descriptions for a long time.

When ChatGPT reads your site, it's looking for clear, specific statements it can use in an answer. Give it some.

• A pricing page in plain text. Not an image, and not "contact sales" alone. If you have a free plan or a starting price, say so in words.
• Comparison and alternatives pages. "Corvella vs Billhaven" and "Billhaven alternatives for agencies" match the prompts buyers type. Be fair and say where the competitor is the better pick. One-sided pages read like ads, and ads don't get quoted.
• Use-case pages for each audience you serve, in their language: "invoicing for design agencies", "invoicing for video production studios".
• Answer-first formatting. Open with a direct one- or two-sentence answer, then the detail. Use tables for features and pricing. Include specifics only you can state: limits, integrations, setup time.
• Public docs and help pages. They answer the long, specific questions ("does Corvella handle retainers in GBP?") that marketing pages never will.

Then check the plumbing. Make sure robots.txt doesn't block OAI-SearchBot, the crawler OpenAI uses for ChatGPT search (see OpenAI's crawler documentation (opens in a new tab)). Make sure your key pages show their content in the HTML without waiting for JavaScript. And confirm your site is indexed in Bing as well as Google, since ChatGPT search draws on third-party search providers.

For most early-stage startups this is the biggest lever. Three independent articles that name your competitor and not you usually outweigh anything on your own site, and those are exactly the pages ChatGPT finds when it searches your category.

Go back to the sources you collected in Step 1 and sort the domains into groups:

1. Listicles and comparison articles. Email the author a short, specific note: what you do, who it's for, and why you'd fit their list. Offer a demo account. Many of these posts are updated regularly.
2. Review sites and directories. Claim your profiles, use your one-line description, fill in every field, and ask a few happy customers for honest reviews.
3. Communities. Answer questions in threads where people compare tools in your category. Say who you are, help first, and mention your product only when it genuinely fits. Fake accounts and planted praise get removed and damage trust.
4. Partners and integrations. Get listed on the marketplace and partner pages of tools you integrate with.

Prioritize domains that appear across several prompts. Corvella's founder might find the same two agency blogs and one Reddit thread cited again and again. Getting onto those three pages is worth more than ten new posts on Corvella's own blog.

Changes don't show up overnight. Updated pages have to be recrawled, and third-party articles have to be published and indexed before they can be cited. Re-run the same prompt set about once a month and compare:

• How many prompts mention you now?
• Has your position in lists improved?
• Is your own site being cited?
• Which competitors still appear ahead of you, and on which sources?

Keep the prompts identical between checks, so you're measuring your changes rather than different questions. The same method works for Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google's AI answers, because they all combine what the model knows with pages they retrieve. The sources differ a little by engine, which is why it's worth checking more than one. For which numbers to track and why they move, see what AI search visibility is and how to measure it.

A realistic plan for one founder with a few spare hours:

1. Write 15 buyer prompts across the four types in Step 1.
2. Run a baseline scan and save the results.
3. Rewrite your homepage H1 and meta description so they name your category and audience.
4. Add Organization structured data with sameAs links.
5. Check robots.txt for anything that blocks OAI-SearchBot.
6. List the 10 domains cited most often for your prompts.
7. Pitch the authors of the top three listicles.
8. Draft one honest comparison page against the competitor ChatGPT names most often.