How to Get Your Business Recommended by AI

To get your business recommended by AI assistants, make it easy to find in the indexes they search, let their search crawlers in, and keep the same facts about you on your site and your listings. Then ask each assistant your customers' questions, without your name in them, and count who it names.

Most of that work is shared. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude can all search the web when a question needs current information, and most of them show the pages they used. They differ in three places: the index they search, the crawler that fills it, and the listing they lean on for local questions.

We're 6AI, an SEO, GEO, and AEO company in Austin. This is the checklist we run for clients.

The six assistants, side by side

Each assistant searches Google's index, Bing's, its own, or a mix, and each one has a crawler you can block by mistake.

We checked each row against the company's own documentation on October 20, 2026. Those pages change, so check them again before you edit your robots.txt.

What every assistant has in common

Every assistant on that list starts from a search index, so they all reward the same basics: pages they can read, facts they can confirm, and sentences they can quote. Google says its AI features have no technical requirements beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet.

• A page for each service you sell, with the answer in the first two sentences: what you do, where, and for whom.
• Pages indexed in both Google and Bing. Google feeds AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini. Bing feeds Copilot, and OpenAI names it as a search provider for ChatGPT. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools show which of your pages each one has.
• Search crawlers let in. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for Disallow lines under OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot, or Bingbot, or under User-agent: *, which applies to any bot without its own rules.
• The same name, address, phone, and description on your site, your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, and every directory you're on.
• Structured data that tells a machine your services, hours, and location, so it doesn't have to guess from the layout.

None of that belongs to one assistant. That's why we run SEO, GEO, and AEO as one job: every assistant on the list starts from a search index.

Where they differ

Three differences explain most cases where one assistant names a business and another leaves it out: the index it searches, the crawlers it runs, and the listing it leans on.

Google's index, Bing's, or their own

Google's AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini draw on Google's index. Copilot draws on Bing. ChatGPT uses OpenAI's own crawler and sends some searches to outside providers, and OpenAI names Bing as one of them. Perplexity and Claude run search crawlers of their own. So a page Google has indexed and Bing hasn't can show up in AI Mode and be missing from Copilot on the same day.

Search crawlers and training crawlers

Each company runs separate bots for search and for training, and the search bots are the ones that decide whether you can be cited. OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and Claude-SearchBot fill search indexes. GPTBot and ClaudeBot collect training data. OpenAI says blocking GPTBot keeps your content out of training, while blocking OAI-SearchBot keeps you out of ChatGPT's search answers. It also says a robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to reach its search.

A third kind of bot fetches a page only when a person asks about it: ChatGPT-User, Perplexity-User, and Claude-User. OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User. Anthropic says blocking Claude-User stops Claude from retrieving your page for a user's question.

Google-Extended works differently

Google-Extended is a token you name in robots.txt, and Google says it does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search. AI Overviews and AI Mode are part of Search, so it doesn't change them. It does control whether Gemini apps can use your content for grounding. Block it, and Gemini can't ground its answers in your pages, while AI Mode still can.

The listing each one leans on

Google's AI features and Gemini lean on your Google Business Profile: Google tells site owners to keep it current for AI features, and Gemini uses public Google Maps information to find places. Copilot searches Bing, so Bing Places for Business is the listing to claim, and it can import your Google profile. OpenAI names Bing as a ChatGPT search provider, so the same listing may help there. Perplexity and Claude cite web pages, so the listing that matters is whichever directory or review site they cite for your question. Testing tells you which.

How to test all of them in one afternoon

The only way to know what an assistant says about your business is to ask it the way a customer would, more than once, and write down what comes back. Here's the protocol we run for clients, cut down to one afternoon.

1. Write three questions a customer would ask, with no business name in them. For example: “Who does [what you do] in [your city]?”, “Who can help with [a specific problem] in [your city]?”, and “Which [service] near [your neighborhood] works with [your kind of customer]?”
2. Open a private window. Signed-in answers can draw on your history and settings, and a private window is closer to what a new customer sees.
3. Ask each question three times in each assistant, in a new chat each time. That's nine runs per assistant and 54 in all, about two to three hours at a steady pace.
4. Run them one at a time, in one tab. Firing many searches at once can trigger a CAPTCHA, and a blocked run tells you nothing.
5. For every run, write down whether you were named, whether you were named first, which of your pages it cited, which competitors it named, and which other sites it cited.
6. Score each assistant as named in N of 9 runs, and save the sheet with the date. That's your baseline.

Then read the column of cited sites. If Perplexity keeps citing one directory and you're not on it, that's your next listing. If Google's AI features name you and Copilot never does, open Bing Webmaster Tools before you change anything else.

Answers change from run to run, so trust the counts over any single answer. Re-run the same questions every few weeks and compare them with the baseline.

Dated examples

Each example below is a single run, so we call it a check, and none of the questions names the business. Every one is on recent projects with its date and source.

Danly Properties is an Austin commercial landlord. We asked “Which locally owned landlords own retail shopping centers in Austin Texas?” On October 12, 2026, ChatGPT named Danly first and linked danlyproperties.com. On October 6, 2026, Perplexity named Danly first too, ahead of three other local landlords, and named two of its properties, 7301 Burnet and Corners Shopping Center.

Post Oak Private Wealth Advisors is a Houston wealth management firm. On October 16, 2026, searching from Houston, we asked Google's AI Mode “Is there a financial advisor in Houston who works with widows?” It listed Post Oak first, citing the widows page we built. For “Who manages investments for retirees in Houston with attention to downside risk and taxes?” it listed Post Oak first again, citing the investment management page we built the day before.

Build or Break is a weekly interview show. On October 6, 2026, we asked Perplexity “What did Kevin O'Leary say about the valley of death?”, a question that never names the show. Perplexity cited the Kevin O'Leary episode page we built first.

Three assistants and one pattern: a site the assistant could read, with pages that answer the question in plain words.

Questions about AI assistants

If you want to start with one assistant, read the ChatGPT guide. If you'd rather have it done for you, 6AI Analytics runs these checks about every 72 hours, on Google and in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, and Google's AI Mode, and the founders make the fixes. To see it on your own business, book a demo and we'll ask your customers' questions live.