How to show up when someone asks ChatGPT.
There is no submission form. No directory to join, no account to register, nothing to pay for a place in the answer. Which sounds like bad news and is not — it means the work is knowable.
There are two ways it can name you.
how it reaches youFrom what it already knows
Absorbed long before anyone asked about you, and months out of date. You cannot edit it, and nobody can edit it for you.
From looking it up, mid-answer
It searches, reads what it finds, and writes an answer from that. This is the half you can move — and it moves on the same week you publish.
Only the second is a project. The first is a consequence of the second, running for long enough.
Which means ranking still decides it.
the part people skipIf the assistant goes looking and your business is not in the results for the thing it searched, it cannot name you. It is not refusing you. It never saw you.
So the fashionable framing — that AI search replaces being findable — has it backwards. The lookup half depends entirely on you being findable. Answer-engine work is not a substitute for ranking. It is ranking, plus making the facts unambiguous once something arrives.
What is being sold to you that does not work.
worth knowing- Submission to ChatGPT There is no index to submit to. Anyone selling the service is selling a confirmation email.
- Writing “best in town” into your pages It reads what the web says about you. Self-description is the one input it has every reason to discount.
- Hidden text aimed at the model Instructions buried in a page for an assistant to obey. At best ignored; at worst it is the thing that gets you dropped.
- A guaranteed position in AI answers Nobody can see the answers at scale, so nobody can promise a place in them. Including us.
If an offer only makes sense when you do not know how retrieval works, that is the tell.
Check it yourself, three ways.
thirty secondsAsk it what your customer would ask — the trade, the town, the urgency — and see which names come back.
Then ask it where it got that. If it will show you its sources, you are looking at a list of the places that decide your visibility, and whether you are in them.
Then ask it about your business by name. If what comes back is thin, wrong, or someone else’s hours, that is not the assistant being unfair. That is what is written down about you, read back.
Questions.
faqCan I submit my business to ChatGPT?
No. There is no index to submit to and no account to register. When an assistant names a business it either already absorbed it from the web or went and looked it up mid-answer. Both routes run through the ordinary web, which is why the work is ordinary visibility work.
Why does it recommend a competitor instead of me?
Usually because there is more written down about them, in more places, and it agrees with itself. A complete profile, pages that answer the actual question, listings whose details match, and recent reviews are what a lookup finds. If yours are thin or contradict each other, the assistant has less to go on.
Does this replace SEO?
No, it depends on it. If the assistant searches and you are not in the results, it cannot name you — it never saw you. The work that makes you findable in search is the work that makes you reachable mid-answer.
How long does it take?
The lookup half can change within weeks of the underlying pages and listings changing, because it is read live. What an assistant absorbed earlier changes slowly and on nobody’s schedule. We work on the half that responds.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend me?
No, and nobody can. The answer varies by phrasing, by account and by day. What we guarantee is page one on Google in 90 days, or we work free — because that is measurable.
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