How to get your brand recommended in ChatGPT
There is no ranking algorithm to game. Assistants recommend brands they can read clearly, that other trusted sources talk about, and whose pages they can crawl. These nine levers are what actually move that — every recommendation Citeloop generates maps back to one of them.
Answer-ready content
Lead each section with a one-sentence definition, keep a clean H2/H3 hierarchy, and add FAQs that mirror how people actually prompt. Assistants lift sentences, not slogans.
Topical authority
One post never wins. A pillar page plus supporting articles across the full funnel — ideally with original data only you have — is what makes a model treat you as the category answer.
Third-party mentions
Reddit threads, review sites, industry press and Wikipedia are cited constantly in “what do people recommend” answers. Being absent there caps your ceiling.
Citation-worthy pages
Concrete numbers, pricing, comparison tables and descriptive URLs give an assistant a reason to link you, not just name you.
Comparison content
A large share of prompts are comparative — “best X”, “X vs Y”, “alternatives to Z”. Publish honest versions before someone else defines you.
Freshness
Outdated pricing and stale examples quietly disqualify you as a source for time-sensitive questions.
Structure and schema
Tables, lists and accurate schema markup parse far more reliably than long prose blocks.
AI crawler access
Plenty of sites block OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended by accident, then wonder why they never appear. Check robots.txt and ungate your best pages.
Measurement
Mentions, citations, sentiment and share of voice across every assistant — tracked over time, not checked once.
Mentions and citations are earned differently
A mention is the assistant naming you inside the answer; it is won mostly through reputation signals across the wider web and drives preference. A citation is the assistant linking one of your pages as a source; it is won through definitive, data-rich, crawlable pages and drives preference plus direct traffic. Track them separately — see AI visibility tracking for the metric definitions.
Do this first
Before writing anything, find out which questions already surface you and which cite a competitor instead. Fixing pages blind is expensive; fixing the two prompts you nearly win is not.
Get a prioritised fix list from your own tracked answers.
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