The pages that rank for this question promise a method and deliver a list of adjectives: be authoritative, be relevant, be trusted. There is no order to the steps, no cost, no timeline, and no admission that OpenAI publishes almost nothing about how ChatGPT picks businesses. A checklist that does not tell you which steps are documented and which are guesses asks you to take the guesses on trust.
The short version. Nobody can get your business recommended by ChatGPT, and anyone promising it is selling a certainty OpenAI does not offer. What you can do is become eligible and easy to describe. Two steps are documented: let OpenAI's search crawler in, and make sure your firewall does not turn it away. The rest is reasonable inference, most of it is free to do yourself, and the results take weeks to months.
- Nobody can guarantee a ChatGPT recommendation, because OpenAI says placement is not guaranteed and publishes no ranking factors.
- Two steps are documented: allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, and make sure your firewall or CDN allows OpenAI's published searchbot IP addresses.
- The rest is reasonable inference: plain facts on your pages, a published price, consistent listings, structured data, reviews and independent mentions.
- Crawler changes take about a day to register, but answers move over weeks to months, so re-run the check every quarter.
- Done for you, it is the $250 a month line inside the $2,400 Grow retainer or the $1,350 SEO fee, and a second market moves that cost.
What OpenAI documents, and what it does not
OpenAI's public statement on ranking is two sentences: results are ranked using multiple factors, and placement is not guaranteed. How ChatGPT chooses which businesses to recommend quotes them in full and sets out what else the help documentation says.
The concrete part is in OpenAI's bots documentation. OAI-SearchBot is described as "used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features". GPTBot is for training, and OpenAI treats the two as separate robots.txt controls. ChatGPT-User visits pages when a user's request prompts it, and OpenAI notes that robots.txt rules may not apply to it. OpenAI also says a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to take effect.
That is the documented list. There is no published factor list, no weighting and no appeal. Each step below is labelled, so you can see which is which.
The checklist, in order
Ordered by what blocks everything else first. The time and cost column is our estimate for a small business doing it in-house.
Steps one and two decide whether you can be found through search at all. Steps three to eight decide whether there is anything clear and consistent to say about you once you are found. Whatever acronym the work is sold under, GEO, AEO and AIO describe this same list.
What not to spend money on
- Guaranteed placement. OpenAI says placement is not guaranteed, so a vendor's guarantee is worth nothing.
- Paying your way in. ChatGPT carries advertising, and OpenAI runs a separate crawler, OAI-AdsBot, for pages submitted as ads. That is a paid slot, labelled as such. OpenAI publishes no way to buy an organic recommendation.
- Bought reviews and paid mentions. They put the one input you are trying to make trustworthy at risk.
- A precise "ChatGPT ranking". Answers to the same question vary between runs. A tool reporting a single position is reporting one sample.
A realistic timeline
- Day one. Robots.txt and the firewall. OpenAI documents about 24 hours for a robots.txt change to take effect.
- Week one. The plain statement and a published price on your own pages.
- Weeks two to four. Listings corrected and structured data in place.
- Months two to six. Reviews and mentions build up. Each assistant refreshes its sources on its own schedule, so in our experience answers move over weeks to months, not days.
- Every quarter. Re-run the check and write the answers down.
The same buyer may also meet an AI summary on Google before any website. AI Overviews and your traffic covers that side, and most of this list helps both.
What it costs to have it done
Done yourself, the checklist costs time rather than money. Done by us, it is the $250 a month AI search visibility line inside the $2,400 Grow retainer, and it is also included in the $1,350 standalone SEO fee. It is not sold on its own, and what AI search visibility actually costs explains why and itemises it.
Two things move that cost. A second market or language adds the $1,400 a month localisation line in Scale. A site crawlers cannot read, or one that never says what the business does, needs fixing first, and a custom build is $4,900 for up to eight pages. Urgency does not move the price.
The descriptions of OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ChatGPT-User and OAI-AdsBot, the published searchbot IP address list and the roughly 24 hours for a robots.txt change to take effect are from OpenAI's bots documentation, read 15 September 2026. OpenAI's statement that ranking uses multiple factors and placement is not guaranteed is from its ChatGPT search help documentation, quoted in full in our earlier article on how ChatGPT chooses businesses. Steps three to eight are labelled inference because OpenAI does not document them as ranking factors. The DIY time and cost column, the step order and the weeks-to-months timeline are our editorial estimates from running AI visibility checks, not published figures. The $250 AI search visibility line, the $2,400 Grow retainer, the $1,350 standalone SEO fee, the $1,400 second-market localisation line and the $4,900 build are our published prices, listed on the pricing page. No third-party statistics are cited.
When to leave this alone
Being named in an answer is not a sale. If your website loses the visitors it already has, fix that first. If your work comes from referrals and your diary is full, steps one and two are enough for now. And if your last ten customers did not start with an assistant, run the check twice a year and spend the rest elsewhere.
Whichever applies, do steps one and two this week. They take an hour, they are the only steps OpenAI documents, and a blocked crawler makes every other step pointless.