How to get your business mentioned in ChatGPT

Before you read any advice on this, spend ten minutes in ChatGPT. Ask which companies in your category and emirate it would suggest, ask what your own company does, and ask what you charge. Whether it names you, gets you wrong or says nothing is your starting position, and it's worth more than any "AI visibility score" you'll be sold.

Open a new chat, write down the exact wording of each question and each answer, and date the page. One run is a sample, not a measurement, but you'll want something to compare against when you repeat it.

Can you rank in ChatGPT?

Not in the sense SEO uses the word. ChatGPT writes one answer to one question, and that answer may name several businesses, one, or none. There's no list of positions to climb, so a promise to "rank you in ChatGPT" describes something that doesn't exist.

Plenty of people are asking it. OpenAI says ChatGPT has about 1.2 billion weekly users: announced on 29 September 2026, reported by TechCrunch on 5 October, and repeated by its chief financial officer on 6 November. It's a global company figure, unaudited, and no UAE number could be found.

Microsoft's Q2 2026 AI Diffusion report ranks the UAE first, with 73.3% of people aged 15 to 64 having used a generative AI product, against 18.8% worldwide. That measures having tried a tool, not asking it to choose a supplier.

OpenAI has also started showing ads, with TechCrunch reporting visual ads beside image-generation results on 5 October 2026. An ad is a paid placement with its own rules, and a different thing from being named in an answer.

Where do ChatGPT's answers come from?

From two places. The first is what the model absorbed in training, which changes only when OpenAI releases a newer model, on a schedule you can't see. The second is the web: when a question needs current information, ChatGPT can search, read pages, and write its answer from what it found.

The second route is the one you can work on. A page that's blocked, vague or contradicted by other sites is a poor source, and a page that's open, specific and confirmed elsewhere gives the model something safe to repeat. Nobody outside OpenAI knows exactly how it picks between sources, so treat this as a sensible bet and not a formula.

Seven steps, and what to do when one fails

1. 01Record your starting position. Ask the ten or so questions a buyer would ask, in Arabic as well as English if you serve Arabic speakers, and save each answer with the date. If ChatGPT has never heard of you, that's normal for a small or new business, and the next six steps are the fix. If it states something wrong, note the claim and look for its source: an old directory listing, a previous trading name, a competitor's comparison page.
2. 02Let the crawlers in. Open your site's robots.txt and read it line by line. OpenAI uses more than one crawler name (GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot are two you'll see), and a rule written for one doesn't cover another. If you can't say in a sentence what each rule does, ask your developer to explain it, and check OpenAI's own documentation for the current list.
3. 03Publish the plain facts. One page that says what you do, for whom, where, in which languages and since when, plus prices or at least a starting price and what moves it. An assistant asked what you charge can only repeat what's published, and if the only figure online is a stale directory listing, that's the figure it will repeat.
4. 04Answer your buyers' questions on your own site, with the answer first and the detail after. Start with the questions your sales team hears most often. If you've nothing to add that ten other sites haven't already said, add something specific to you: your process, your service area, your turnaround, your terms.
5. 05Make your details identical everywhere. Your name in English and in Arabic, contact details, services and hours should match across your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and trade directories. When two sources disagree, the assistant has to guess, so fix the oldest listing first and claim any you don't control.
6. 06Get described accurately by other people. That means trade bodies, supplier and partner pages, local press and customer reviews. If nobody writes about you yet, start with the people who already know your work, and give them the exact wording of your name and what you do. Don't pay anyone to place mentions on sites that exist to sell them.
7. 07Repeat the test every month with the same questions. A second run of the same question can read differently, so judge the trend over several months and never one reply. If you appear in some runs and not others, you're borderline, which is useful to know. If a wrong claim persists, trace it to its source and fix that.

Step 1 and step 7 are covered in more detail in how to measure whether AI assistants mention your business. Step 6 gets its own post, why third-party mentions shape what AI says about you.

What can't you control?

• Whether your business is in the training data of the next model, or how it's weighted.
• Which sources the assistant favours for a given question on a given day.
• Whether a particular buyer asks an assistant at all, or just asks a friend on WhatsApp.
• What a competitor writes about you, true or not.

A guarantee of mentions is a promise about things the seller doesn't control. The groundwork also overlaps heavily with ordinary SEO: pages that are open, clear and trusted help in both places, and they're the part you can verify. Start by reading your robots.txt and your Google Business Profile this week.

Anyone who can show you a ChatGPT "rank" is showing you one run of one prompt.