How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my app?

Where each assistant looks

This is as it stood on 17 September 2026, from each company's own documentation and, for Brave and the assistant that draws on it, from published reports. It changes from month to month, so check it against today's documentation before you rely on it.

• ChatGPT answers from OpenAI's own index, from Bing and from other sources. Its search crawler is OAI-SearchBot. A site that blocks it does not appear in ChatGPT's search answers.
• Copilot answers from Bing, which is read by Bingbot.
• Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode use Google's index, read by Googlebot. Google says there is nothing extra to do beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet.
• Gemini grounds its answers on Google Search. The Google-Extended setting in robots.txt decides whether it may use your pages, so do not block it.
• Brave. One of the AI assistants' web search has drawn on Brave. Brave has no sitemap submission, does not take IndexNow, and mostly finds pages that already rank elsewhere. So the way into Brave is to rank on Google and Bing.
• Perplexity keeps its own index, read by PerplexityBot.

The setup, done once

1. Google Search Console, with your sitemap submitted.
2. Bing Webmaster Tools, with your sitemap submitted. ChatGPT and Copilot both draw on Bing.
3. IndexNow, told about your pages on every deploy, so Bing hears about changes the same day.
4. Brave: ask it to fetch your main pages at search.brave.com/submit-url on launch day and after any big change, because one of the AI assistants' search has drawn on Brave.
5. A robots.txt that lets the assistants' search crawlers in by name: OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, and the search crawler each other assistant names in its own documentation.
6. Your page text in the HTML the server sends. The main AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so a page that is only drawn in the browser can be invisible to them.
7. After a big change, ask for indexing by hand, then give the engines one to two weeks.

Use the words people type

PrepAMT was first written around the words its founder picked. But people searching for exam prep type the name of the exam. When ChatGPT was asked for prep sites for that exam, it listed 29 of them, tiny ones included, and PrepAMT was not among them. So the whole site was rewritten around the exam's name: every page, every heading, every machine readable field, and a whole section of the site was renamed. Prep66 does the same with the name of its own exams: it is in the title, the headings and the structured data. If the words your buyers type are not on your pages, the pages do nothing, and the assistants never mention you.

Write pages worth citing

The pages that got Prep66 cited were reference pages: the things people sitting an exam look up before they buy. A glossary. A page of facts and figures. What the exams cost. Pass rates. A free practice question with its explanation and the study material it came from. All of it in the HTML. Your buyers look things up before they buy too. Write those pages, put real prices and recent dates on them, and they stand a better chance of being cited.

How to find the gaps

1. Ask the assistants your buyers use the questions a buyer would ask before buying. Ask each question several times, in fresh chats.
2. Count how often your product comes up, and note who is named instead.
3. Write the page for the question you are missing from.
4. Get it indexed, then ask again.

Once Prep66's reference pages were indexed, ChatGPT named it when asked to recommend a study platform. In one fresh chat it ranked Prep66 first and quoted the real prices and subject counts straight off the site. Gemini started sending signups about a week later. That was one small niche where the other sites were weak, and the assistants give a different list almost every time they are asked, so do not expect one good answer to hold.

What does not help

• llms.txt. Google says Search does not use it, and no AI company has said its crawler reads it. It costs nothing to add, but it proves nothing either.
• FAQ markup for its own sake. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026. The markup is still valid and other engines still read it, so use it only on a page that really has questions and answers.
• Bought or fake mentions. Google's guide for AI search says inauthentic mentions are not as helpful as they might seem.

How to see it working

Record the source of every signup. From 27 August 2026 to 3 September 2026, Prep66 recorded 13 signups: 6 from ChatGPT, 5 from Google search, one from a paid ad and one direct. Bing Webmaster Tools shows how often Copilot and Bing's AI answers cite your pages, and Search Console shows impressions in Google's AI features. Neither of them counts ChatGPT. Only your own signup records do.