Mentioned

How to get your brand recommended by ChatGPT in 2026

The short answer: there is no guaranteed way to make ChatGPT pick your brand. What you can do is make your site eligible for ChatGPT search, publish the page types answers actually cite (especially pricing and product pages), show up in cold buyer questions that never name you, win the shortlist when a buyer is already comparing you to competitors, then measure named vs picked and fix gaps. OpenAI says placement is not guaranteed. Treat this as a practical loop, not a switch you flip once.

The rest of this guide walks through that loop with what we saw in our own runs and what OpenAI and Perplexity publish about their crawlers.

Mentioned is not the same as recommended

An AI answer can name your brand without recommending it. "X is another option" is a mention. "I'd tell them to use X" is a recommendation. In our runs, brands were often named as alternatives while a competitor got the pick. If you only search the answer for your name, you'll count both the same way and miss whether you actually won.

Track two outcomes separately: were we named? and were we the pick?

What our runs show about who wins (one run each)

On Oct 27, 2026 (~8:39 PM CT), we asked ChatGPT and Perplexity four buyer questions through their official APIs with web search on. The prompts named no brands: a buyer asked for the best tool in a category, and we asked each engine to name specific products and say which one it would tell them to use. Each was a single run, so treat these as examples of what you'll see, not rankings. API answers can also differ from the chat app.

  • Email marketing for a small business: ChatGPT picked Constant Contact. Perplexity picked Brevo. Mailchimp was named by both, but only as an alternative—named, not picked.
  • Project management for a small team: ChatGPT picked Asana. Perplexity picked Trello. ChatGPT cited Asana and monday.com pricing pages; Perplexity cited Trello and Asana pricing pages.
  • AI coding assistant: both picked GitHub Copilot. Runner-up differed: Cursor in ChatGPT, Claude Code in Perplexity. Product pages from GitHub/Cursor were among the citations.
  • CRM for a small business: both picked HubSpot. ChatGPT linked HubSpot's CRM product page. In Perplexity's CRM search results we also saw a pricing page for a brand that never made it into the written answer (Pipedrive)—being found by search is not the same as being in the answer.

Cross-cutting patterns from those eight answers:

  • 4 of 8 answers linked a pricing page. Pricing pages were heavily cited, especially in project management.
  • Brands' own product and pricing pages get cited. Engines lean on pages they can quote.
  • Engines disagree on winners in some categories. Email and project management split; CRM and AI coding agreed on the pick.

None of that means a checklist forces a pick. It does tell you which page types to publish and which outcomes to measure.

Step 1: Let the search crawlers in

If ChatGPT search can't see your site, you won't show up in search-backed answers.

ChatGPT search uses OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers (they may still appear as navigational links). GPTBot is separate—it's used for training—so you can block GPTBot without blocking search (OpenAI crawlers). ChatGPT-User is for user-triggered fetches; it is not the same as the OAI-SearchBot crawl that decides search eligibility.

Perplexity uses PerplexityBot to surface and link sites in search results, and Perplexity-User for user-triggered fetches (Perplexity crawlers).

Check your robots.txt and any CDN or firewall rules for OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. Both companies say robots.txt changes can take about 24 hours to apply. Then confirm the important pages (home, product, pricing, comparisons) return cleanly to a crawler—no soft blocks, login walls, or empty shells.

Step 2: Publish pages answers can cite

Answers cite pages they can read and quote. In our runs, pricing pages showed up often, and brands' own product pages got linked when they were the pick. If competitors get cited for /pricing and you never publish prices, there's nothing of yours to cite for that part of the answer.

Prioritize:

  • A clear pricing page (or an honest free/paid breakdown a buyer can verify)
  • A clear product page that states what you do and who it's for
  • Honest comparison or "alternatives" pages when buyers ask that way
  • Facts a model can quote without inventing them: plans, limits, supported use cases

OpenAI's help page also notes that search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect—and tells people to open the cited source. Keep your public pages accurate so a citation that points at you still holds up when someone clicks through (OpenAI Help: Searching the web with ChatGPT).

Step 3: Show up where buyers ask without your name

Cold discovery questions never include your brand. They look like:

  • "What's the best [category] for a small business?"
  • "What's the best [category] for [use case]?"
  • "Cheapest [category] that does [key feature]?"
  • "[Competitor] alternatives?"

Ask those in a clean ChatGPT chat with web search on, then in Perplexity. OpenAI says ChatGPT search may rewrite your question into search queries; memory (if enabled) can affect those rewrites; and approximate location can come from your IP (OpenAI Help: Searching the web with ChatGPT). Use a temporary or logged-out chat when you can, so your own history doesn't steer the answer.

Leave your brand name out of the prompt. When a prompt already names products, ChatGPT can stay inside that list—we saw answers that opened with "Between the products you named..." and never looked outside it. That tests shortlist comparison, not cold discovery. For discovery, keep the question brand-free.

Log five things per answer: question, engine, named?, picked?, who was picked, pages cited. Run ChatGPT and Perplexity—our runs disagreed on winners in half the categories.

For a full walkthrough of this check, see How to check if ChatGPT recommends your brand.

Step 4: Win the shortlist comparison

Discovery and shortlist are different jobs. A buyer (or a check) that already names you plus two competitors is asking: given these options, who wins?

Mentioned's free check tests that shortlist case. It asks five buyer questions in ChatGPT and Perplexity (official APIs, web search on) and tells each engine the buyer is comparing your product and domain with up to two competitors you choose. It shows whether you were mentioned or recommended, where you ranked against them, and which pages were cited—plus three fixes to start with. One run, free, no card.

Use both methods: cold questions tell you whether you get found; the shortlist check tells you whether you win once you're on the list.

Run the free check at mentionedhq.com/check

Step 5: Measure, fix, repeat

One run is a snapshot. Re-run the same cold questions on another day before you treat them as a verdict. When you change robots.txt, pricing, or product copy, wait for crawler timing (about 24 hours for robots.txt per the docs above) and re-check.

Also watch referrals. ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to referral links it sends, so you can filter for it in analytics (OpenAI Publishers FAQ). It won't catch everyone—people who read an answer and type your URL later won't carry the tag—so a simple "how did you hear about us?" at signup helps fill the gap.

A simple weekly loop works:

  1. Re-run 5 cold buyer questions in ChatGPT and Perplexity
  2. Re-run (or refresh) a shortlist comparison against your top two competitors
  3. Note named vs picked and which pages were cited
  4. Fix the biggest gap (crawl access, missing pricing/product page, weak comparison page)
  5. Repeat

What this will not do

  • It will not guarantee placement. OpenAI says placement is not guaranteed.
  • It will not make one checklist work the same for every category—engines can disagree, and citations can be wrong or stale.
  • It will not turn a mention into a recommendation by itself. Named ≠ picked.
  • It will not replace having a real product page a buyer (and a crawler) can understand.

Next step: check where you stand

Start with the free shortlist check, then run a few cold buyer questions by hand using the related guide.

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