You can't pay to be recommended by Claude or ChatGPT, and anyone who guarantees it is guessing. What you can do is make your business easy for an assistant to find, trust and quote: let its search crawlers read your site, put your facts in plain sentences on pages that answer real questions, keep your listings and reviews consistent, and then check the answers yourself every week. The steps below take about a day to set up and 20 minutes a week to keep going, and none of them depend on a trick.

If you landed here hoping to use Claude to find customers instead, that is a different job, covered in how to find clients using Claude. This page is about the other direction: a buyer asks an assistant "who should I hire," and you want your name in the answer.

What an assistant does when someone asks for a recommendation

When web search is switched on, an assistant looks up pages, reads them and answers with links to what it used. When it is off, the answer comes from what the model learned in training, which stops at a cutoff date and knows little about a business that opened last year. So there are two routes to being named: be on the pages it searches, and be mentioned often enough in the world that the model learned your name.

Both companies publish the names of the crawlers they use, and the names matter because a robots.txt file can block them. OpenAI lists OAI-SearchBot for search results, GPTBot for training, and ChatGPT-User for pages opened when a person asks a question. Anthropic lists Claude-SearchBot for search, Claude-User for pages opened on a person's behalf, and ClaudeBot for training. OpenAI's documentation says a site that has opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it can still appear as a plain navigational link, and Anthropic says blocking its search and user crawlers may reduce your visibility. You can block the training crawlers and still allow the search ones. They are separate settings.

Step 1: check that you are not blocking the ones that matter

Open yourwebsite.example/robots.txt in a browser. If the file does not exist, or only blocks admin pages, you are not blocking anyone. If you see lines that disallow OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot or Claude-User, and you want to be found, replace them with:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-User
Allow: /

Then check one more place. Some hosting companies and firewall services block AI crawlers by default or have a switch for it, so look in the security settings of your host. OpenAI says changes to robots.txt can take about a day to take effect for search.

Step 2: one page for each question a buyer asks

Assistants answer questions, so write pages that are answers. Take Hal, who runs a made-up plumbing company in Tulsa. His buyers ask: "Do you do emergency water heater repair on weekends in Tulsa?" "What does a water heater replacement cost?" "Are you licensed and insured?" He gives each its own page, and the first sentence of each is the answer: "Yes, we repair water heaters on Saturdays and Sundays across Tulsa, with a $95 weekend call-out fee that comes off the repair." A page that opens with a paragraph about "our commitment to quality" gives the assistant nothing to quote.

Put prices or starting prices on the page if you can. A page that says "from $1,450 for a standard 40-gallon replacement, installed" is more likely to be quoted than one that says "call for a quote," and your own numbers become the answer to the cost question.

Step 3: the same facts, everywhere

Write one block of facts and copy it exactly: business name, address, phone, hours, the cities you serve, license and insurance details. Put it on your site, your Google Business Profile, and every directory your trade uses. When an assistant finds three sources that agree, it is more likely to repeat the fact. When it finds three that disagree, it may hedge or skip you. The listing side is covered in Google Business Profile leads, and a checklist for the site itself is in website for a service business.

Step 4: reviews that say something

"Great service!" gives an assistant nothing to repeat. "They replaced our water heater the same afternoon and left the garage cleaner than they found it" does. You can't write those yourself, and you shouldn't fake them, but you can ask customers a better question: instead of "please leave a review," send "what did we fix, and how long did it take?" Ask everyone, not only the happy ones. The routine is in how to get more Google reviews.

Step 5: be mentioned where buyers ask each other

Assistants that search the web can pull in forum threads, local news, association pages and directories alongside business sites. A recommendation in a thread where someone asked "who is a good plumber in Tulsa" is worth more than another paragraph on your own site. That means being a useful, honest voice where your buyers ask, and getting listed on the pages that people in your trade already trust: the local chamber, the trade association, the supplier's "find an installer" page.

Test it yourself every week

Open a new chat with web search on and ask five questions in your buyer's words. "Who is a good emergency plumber in Tulsa?" "What does a water heater replacement cost in Tulsa?" Write down whether you are named, who is named instead, and which pages were cited. Ask each question three times, because answers change from one run to the next, and treat what you see as a trend, not a score. Changes can take weeks to show, since crawlers have to come back to your pages first.

The cited pages tell you more than the answer does. If a competitor is named because of a directory you are not in, you have your next task. If your own page is cited but with the wrong price, you have a page to fix.

What to skip

  • Anyone who sells a guaranteed spot in AI answers. No one controls these results.
  • Keyword-stuffed pages or hidden text. Assistants read the visible page like a person would.
  • Fake reviews. They violate the review sites' rules, and customers can tell.
  • Rewriting your whole site before fixing robots.txt and your facts. The basics come first.

If your product is software, ChatGPT and Claude each have a place to list apps and connectors, which is a separate route from being found in web answers.

Being recommended is slow and not in your control. Another part of the same job is going where buyers are already asking: Rocketship's Conversations finds Reddit, Quora and LinkedIn threads where people ask for what you sell, then drafts a reply that you edit and post from your own account. A 7-day free trial shows you the threads for your own business; a card is required to start.