Ten free things you can do to get recommended by ChatGPT

These ten cost nothing and need nobody hired. They help, and one of them has already erased entire brands from AI answers on its own. What they do not do is the whole job, and the reason is written at the end.

First, a distinction most people get wrong. Being recommended and being cited are two different events. A 2026 study of forty software categories measured it: when ChatGPT recommends a tool, it cites that tool's own site in 11.6% of cases. Showing up in the answer and showing up in the source list are different things, and they are worked on in different ways.

1. Ask before you touch anything

Write 25 to 50 questions a real customer of yours would ask. In most of them, leave your company name out: "best dental clinic in Oeiras," "how much does a kitchen remodel cost," "is an AI answering service worth it."

Run them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, in a private window so you do not pick up your own account's memory. For each answer, note whether your company appears, in what position, and which sources the engine cited.

That source list is your task list. Those are the pages you need to be on.

2. Confirm the engines can get in

This is the most expensive mistake there is, and the most common. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and check whether you are blocking any of these: OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Bingbot.

One wrong line in that file erases a brand from AI answers entirely, and shows no error at all to anyone visiting the site.

Then check what robots.txt does not show. Many hosts started blocking AI crawlers by default, and the engine hits a closed door without the file saying a word.

3. See the site the way the engine sees it

Turn JavaScript off in your browser and reload the page. What is left is roughly what the engine reads.

An analysis of more than five hundred million requests from OpenAI's crawler found no evidence of JavaScript execution. If the text only appears after the browser runs code, the page is empty as far as the engine is concerned. Text inside images is invisible too.

4. Get into Bing

Without this, ChatGPT has a much harder time finding you.

Bing Webmaster Tools is free and imports everything from Google Search Console in two clicks. Submit the sitemap there separately, because Bing does not inherit Google's, and turn on IndexNow, which tells Bing the moment a page changes.

It also carries a performance report for AI answers. That is the only free, first-party source on this subject that exists today.

5. Fill the Google profile all the way

If the business has an address or a service area, this is the most direct route to being recommended by Gemini, because Google wires Gemini into this layer.

Fill in everything. Correct primary category, hours, holiday hours, payment methods, accessibility. The full service list with a written description on each one, not blank descriptions. In the questions and answers section, post the frequently asked questions yourself and answer them, because that is text Gemini reads.

Name, address and phone written exactly the same way everywhere. No "Ltd." in one place and not in another.

6. Answer reviews with substance

A review request after every job, with a direct link. Volume and recency count for more than a perfect average.

And answer all of them, because response rate is a measured signal. A reply that says "thank you" is worth nothing. One that says "thank you, glad the kitchen remodel in Cascais came in on schedule" is text with information in it, and it is indexable.

7. Build the pages that are missing

Most sites do not have the pages AI needs to read:

• One sentence saying what the company does, written to be extracted
• Prices, even as ranges. Pages without prices lose consistently on qualification questions
• Who the service is for and who it is not for
• The process, step by step, with timelines
• The areas served, each with its own real content
• Frequently asked questions, the real ones you actually get
• An about page with people, dates and background

8. Answer first, explain second

Every section heading is a question written the way a customer would write it. Underneath, the first forty to sixty words answer it, and only then comes the context.

There is a solid reason: 44.2% of AI citations come from the first 30% of the text. Saving the conclusion for the end is hiding it.

9. Trade the vague for numbers with a source

This is the best-measured technique of the lot. In a study out of Princeton and IIT Delhi, with around ten thousand queries tested, citing credible sources improved visibility by 30 to 40%, and adding concrete numbers by 30 to 41%.

In practice: instead of "fast projects," write "a full three-bedroom apartment remodel takes fourteen to eighteen weeks." Instead of "many studies show," say which one, by whom, and from what year.

The same study measured stuffing the text with keywords: minus 8%. Worse than doing nothing.

Two they will sell you that are not enough on their own

Structured data. A 2026 Ahrefs study concluded that adding JSON-LD produces no significant lift in citations by itself. It is worth doing, because it removes ambiguity about who you are and it is cheap, but anyone selling it to you as the main lever is selling you the wrong thing. And there is a rule people forget: what the code declares has to be written on the page. Claiming thirty years of experience in the JSON-LD and mentioning it nowhere builds no trust.

Keyword stuffing. Measured above. It hurts.

10. Touch what is already there

AI tools cite pages 25.7% fresher than the ones traditional search shows. Content updated in the last thirty to ninety days has a measurable edge.

And a new page can start being cited in three to five days, which makes this the fastest of the ten to show a signal.

What these ten do not do

They build the house. They do not build the street.

The part that decides is played outside your site. 88% of citations point to third-party pages, not to the brand's own site. Mentions of your name elsewhere correlate more strongly with citations than traditional links do, and the mention does not even need to be a link. That is not an afternoon's work, and Reddit and authority building take ten to fourteen weeks to move ChatGPT.

And every engine is a separate scoreboard. A 2026 audit found only 11% overlap between the domains cited by ChatGPT and those cited by Perplexity. You measure engine by engine, and you measure by language, because being visible in English does not predict being visible in Portuguese. Averaging the two hides the problem instead of showing it.

And this is not a job that ends. In June 2025 Google removed more than three billion entities from its graph in a single week. The ones that survived were well supported and consistent across several places.

If after these ten you want to know where you stand and where your competitors stand, that is what we do.