Getting visible in ChatGPT: 7 levers for businesses

Lever 1: Access for OpenAI's crawlers

For web search in ChatGPT, OpenAI uses the OAI-SearchBot crawler. If it is blocked via robots.txt, a firewall or a CDN rule, ChatGPT cannot use your pages as a source. Check these settings first.

Lever 2: Content that is readable without JavaScript

Important content should be present directly in the delivered HTML. Pages whose text is only loaded in the browser via JavaScript are difficult or impossible for many crawlers to read.

Lever 3: Answer specific questions

Users don't ask ChatGPT “tax adviser Munich”, but “Which tax adviser in Munich is good for self-employed people?”. Pages that answer such questions directly in the first paragraph and back them up with facts are more likely to be selected as a source.

Lever 4: An unambiguous brand entity

Name, services, locations and people should be described identically on the website, in company profiles and in directories. Contradictions lead a model to classify a brand vaguely or incorrectly. More on this in Entity Optimization.

Lever 5: Presence in the right third-party sources

For comparison questions, ChatGPT often relies on comparison articles, specialist portals, review platforms and industry directories. Which sources are relevant in your industry is shown by a source analysis in the GEO Audit.

Lever 6: Don't forget Bing

Clean indexing in Bing is a sensible foundation for AI visibility overall – not least because Microsoft Copilot builds on it. Register your website in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Lever 7: Measure instead of guessing

A single test in ChatGPT tells you little, because answers vary. What makes sense is a fixed catalogue of questions that is queried and evaluated regularly – see Measuring AI Visibility.

Serious GEO work does not manipulate models. It ensures that accurate information about a company is easy to find, unambiguous and credibly substantiated.