Diagnosis
Why isn't my business showing up in ChatGPT answers?
Four causes, in the order worth checking. The first one is the most common and takes about ten minutes to rule out.
You typed your own company into ChatGPT and it named your competitors instead. That's a specific problem with specific causes, and they're diagnosable in about ten minutes.
Work through these in order. The first one is the most common and the easiest to fix, and there's no point looking at the others until it's ruled out.
The AI crawlers can't read your site
Every website has a file called robots.txt that tells automated visitors what they may read. Most sites were configured before AI assistants existed, and a great many either block the AI crawlers outright or fail to explicitly welcome them.
How to check: type your domain followed by /robots.txt into a browser. Look for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended. If they're absent or disallowed, the model has never read your site, and nothing else you do will matter until that changes.
Your pages describe you; they don't answer questions
Look at your website through a model's eyes. It's trying to answer someone's question. Does any page on your site plainly ask a buyer's real question and answer it directly?
Most business sites have a services page, an about page, and a contact page. Those describe the company. They give a model almost nothing to extract when someone asks "what's the best option for a situation like mine?" — because the answer isn't on the page in a form that can be quoted.
The model isn't confident you're a real, specific company
If your business is described one way on your site, differently on LinkedIn, and a third way in an old directory listing — different name variants, different descriptions, an outdated address — the model has low confidence that these are all the same entity. Low-confidence entities don't get named in recommendations.
Nobody the model trusts has ever mentioned you
When an assistant answers "who are the best options in this category?", it is very often reading a third-party page that already answers that question — an industry directory, a review platform, a "best of" list, a Reddit thread.
If you have never appeared on any of those, you are not in the pool the model is choosing from, no matter how good your own website is. This is the cause people most often overlook, and frequently the fastest to move.
It's usually not one cause — it's all four, a little. Which is oddly good news: each one is fixable, and they compound. Fixing crawler access alone rarely produces a citation. Fixing all four reliably does, given time.
What to do about it
In order of effort:
- Today: check your robots.txt and allow the AI crawlers. This is a small edit to one file and costs nothing.
- This month: write one page that plainly answers the single question your best customers ask before they buy. Question as the heading, answer in the first two sentences.
- This month: make your name, description, address, and phone identical everywhere you appear online.
- This quarter: get listed in the directories and industry lists that already rank for "best [your category]." Answer real questions in the places your buyers ask them.
Then check again. And keep checking — positions decay, and the ones you win need holding.
Common questions
My Google rankings are fine. Why doesn't that help?
Because they're different systems with different selection rules. Google returns a list of links and lets you choose. An AI assistant reads sources, decides which to trust, and speaks for them. You can be at the top of one and absent from the other, and many businesses currently are.
How long until I show up after fixing these?
Perplexity reads the live web and may reflect changes within a week or two. ChatGPT and Claude update their picture of the world more slowly — plan on sixty to ninety days before you see meaningful movement.
Should I just pay for ads in AI answers instead?
Paid placement in AI assistants is emerging and will keep changing. Earned citations are more durable and considerably cheaper. The two aren't mutually exclusive, but building the earned position first means you aren't renting your existence.