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Guide · GEO for SaaS

How to get your product recommended by ChatGPT

ChatGPT and Google’s AI recommend products from what they find when they search the web and from what the pages they cite say. Here is how to check where you stand, what 3,402 AI answers taught us about one product, and the fixes in the order that matters.

By the Kliqo team · Updated · Every number has a source

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The short answer

Five things, in this order.

  1. Be crawlable. Let OpenAI’s and Google’s search crawlers read your site, robots.txt included.
  2. Get onto the pages AI cites for your buyers’ questions: best-of lists, reviews, comparisons, Reddit threads.
  3. Make comparison pages say where you fit, in a sentence an answer can repeat.
  4. Keep your facts consistent everywhere: name, category, price, limits, dates.
  5. Measure before and after on the same questions and the same AIs.

What decides it

ChatGPT recommends what it finds.

When a buyer asks something that needs current information, like which tool to buy, ChatGPT can search the web, read a handful of pages and write its answer from them.[4] Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on Google Search and link the pages they used.[5] In the 3,402 answers we tracked for one product, 2,125 cited at least one source.[2]

So a recommendation depends on four things: whether the AI can read your site, whether you appear on the pages it finds for the buyer’s question, what those pages say about who you’re for, and what the model already learned in training. The last one you can’t change quickly. The first three you can.

  1. The buyer asks

    A question in their own words, such as “best help desk for a 5-person team”. Rarely your brand name.

    You can’t change the question. You can track the ones your buyers ask.

  2. The AI searches

    It turns the question into web searches. ChatGPT and Google’s AI don’t search the same way, and they read different sites.

    Out of your hands, so check each AI separately.

  3. It reads and cites pages

    Best-of lists, comparisons, reviews, community threads and vendor pages. Your own site counts only if its crawler can read it.

    You can influence this: be crawlable, and be on these pages.

  4. It writes the answer

    It names a few products and recommends some of them, based on how the pages it read describe each one.

    You can influence this: give those pages a clear sentence about who you’re for.

How to check

Ask your buyers’ questions. Twice. On two AIs.

  1. Write 10 to 20 buyer questions the way a buyer would ask them: the problem, team size, budget, the tool they’re leaving. Leave your brand name out. People who already know your name aren’t the ones you’re missing.
  2. Ask each question at least twice, in a fresh chat without your history. Answers change between runs: the same question can leave a product out in one run and name it first in the next.
  3. Ask ChatGPT and Google’s AI (AI Mode, or the AI Overview in search). They read different sources, so one can recommend you while the other doesn’t.
  4. Write down five things per answer: named or not, recommended or not, your position, which competitors were recommended, and which pages were cited. The cited pages are your to-do list.

By hand, that’s a good first look. Kliqo asks your questions every night on 3 AI models and records the same five things for every answer.

Our data

What we saw tracking one product for 30 days.

A small software product in a crowded category with well-known competitors, tracked from its first scan: 47 buyer questions every night on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overview, plus its website’s AI crawler logs. We keep the product anonymous. Four findings shaped the fixes below.

1. ChatGPT never named it: 0 of 1,160 answers.

Across 3,402 answers, the product was named 6 times: 5 in AI Mode, 1 in AI Overview and none in ChatGPT.[1] The category wasn’t empty. Its best-known competitor was named in 651 answers, 151 of them in ChatGPT.[1]

  • ChatGPT0 of 1,160
  • AI Mode5 of 1,115
  • AI Overview1 of 1,127
Answers that name the product, of all completed answers. Sep 14 – Oct 12, 2026.[1]

2. Its comparison page was cited 8 times. Competitors got recommended.

The product had a blog post comparing two competitors. Google’s AI Overview cited it in 8 answers to the same question. In those 8 answers, a third competitor was named and recommended every time, and the product itself was named in none.[1,2]

The page compared two other products and never said who its own product was for, so the answers had nothing to say about it. Across all 3,402 answers, the product’s site was cited in 17, and 11 of those didn’t name the product.[2] Being cited isn’t being recommended.

AI Overview · 8 answers to one prompt
Cited in all 8:The product’s own “Competitor A vs Competitor B” blog post
BrandNamedRecommended
  • A competitor not in the post8 of 88 of 8
  • Competitor A, in the post’s title8 of 86 of 8
  • Competitor B, in the post’s title7 of 8—
  • The tracked product0 of 80 of 8
Answers to one prompt that cite the post. “—” = not counted in our data.[1,2]

3. Google’s AI and ChatGPT read different sites.

For the same questions, Google’s AI cited YouTube in 622 answers and Reddit in 378. ChatGPT cited each of them in 1 answer.[2] ChatGPT leaned on vendor sites instead: one competitor’s own domain was cited in 174 ChatGPT answers.[2]

The recommendations split the same way. One competitor was named 187 times by Google’s AI (AI Mode 97, AI Overview 90) and 5 times by ChatGPT.[1] “Optimize for AI” isn’t one job: a YouTube video can help on Google and do little for ChatGPT.

  • youtube.com

    Google’s AI622 answers
    ChatGPT1 answer

    Google’s AI = AI Overview 315 + AI Mode 307 answers

  • reddit.com

    Google’s AI378 answers
    ChatGPT1 answer

    Google’s AI = AI Mode 235 + AI Overview 143 answers

Answers that cite the domain at least once. Google’s AI: 2,242 answers; ChatGPT: 1,160.[2]

4. Its site gave AI crawlers errors on robots.txt.

Over 30 days, IP-verified AI crawlers got 56 server errors from the product’s website. 43 of them were on /robots.txt.[3] OpenAI’s search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, got an HTTP 520 on robots.txt 8 times.[3]

Under the robots.txt standard, a crawler that can’t read robots.txt because of a server error must assume the whole site is disallowed, unless it still has a recent copy.[6] Nobody on the team had noticed: the pages loaded fine in a browser.

43 of 56

server errors to IP-verified AI crawlers were on /robots.txt

8

HTTP 520 responses to OAI-SearchBot on /robots.txt

  • OAI-SearchBot · GET /robots.txtOct 8, 2026 · 21:47 UTC · IP-verified4×520
  • OAI-SearchBot · GET /robots.txtOct 9, 2026 · 00:08 UTC · IP-verified4×520
IP-verified = the request came from an IP range the AI company publishes, or Cloudflare verified the bot. Sep 13 – Oct 12, 2026.[3]

The fixes

The fixes, in order.

Ordered by what blocks what. A page AI can’t read can’t be cited, and a citation that doesn’t say where you fit doesn’t get you recommended.

Be crawlable

Check that robots.txt allows the crawlers that feed answers: OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User for ChatGPT, Googlebot for Google’s AI features.[4,5] GPTBot is OpenAI’s training crawler; blocking it is a separate choice.

Then check that robots.txt itself answers with a 200, and that your CDN, firewall or bot protection doesn’t refuse these user agents. In our data the rules were fine and the server was the problem. Our free AI crawler checker shows both for any domain.

Get onto the pages AI cites

Take the cited pages from your check and sort them by how many answers cite them. Most will be best-of lists, comparisons and reviews, and on Google, Reddit threads and YouTube videos.

Ask list authors to include you, with one sentence on who you’re best for. Answer Reddit threads where your product really fits, and say that you make it. Send your product to people who review tools in your category. In our data, one independent review post on a personal newsletter was cited in 108 answers, more than the category leader’s own website (41).[2]

Make comparison pages say where you fit

A comparison page that only lists features gives an answer nothing to say about you. The tracked product’s comparison page was cited 8 times and its product was named 0 times.[1,2]

Put your product in the comparison and write the verdict in plain sentences: who should pick you, who should pick the alternative, at what price. Be fair, and say when a competitor is the better pick.

Keep your facts consistent

Use the same product name, category, price and limits on your site, docs, directories, review sites and profiles, and update the old pages. Answers repeat what they read, including stale details.

Measure before and after

Record a baseline on your questions and AIs before you change anything. After the change, compare equal windows on the same questions, not one lucky answer. Kliqo compares the 14 days before with the 14 days after, on the same prompts and models, and shows “Measuring” until there are enough answers.

Expect weeks, not days: pages have to be fetched again, and new mentions on other sites have to be found first.

Know every morning whether AI recommended you.

Kliqo asks your buyers’ questions every night on 3 AI models, records who each answer names and recommends and which pages it cites, suggests fixes, and measures them before and after. 7-day free trial.

Start free trialCheck your AI crawlers

FAQ

Questions, answered.

How do I get my product recommended by ChatGPT?

Make your site readable by OpenAI's search crawler, get your product onto the pages ChatGPT cites for your buyers' questions (best-of lists, reviews, comparison pages, community threads), say plainly on your own comparison pages who your product is best for, keep your name, pricing and facts the same everywhere, and measure the same questions before and after each change.

Does blocking GPTBot remove my product from ChatGPT's answers?

Not by itself. OpenAI documents GPTBot as its training crawler and OAI-SearchBot as the crawler for search results in ChatGPT. If you want to appear in ChatGPT's search answers, allow OAI-SearchBot and make sure your server and CDN don't refuse it.

Why does ChatGPT give a different answer to the same question?

Answers are generated fresh each time and the web pages a search returns can change, so the list of products moves between runs. Ask every question more than once before drawing conclusions.

Is GEO for SaaS different from SEO?

It overlaps. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode build on Google Search, so search basics still matter. The difference is the unit you win: a recommendation inside one answer, decided by the few pages the AI read. In our data, Google's AI cited YouTube and Reddit hundreds of times while ChatGPT cited each once, so check each AI separately.

How long until ChatGPT starts recommending my product?

There is no fixed time. A change to a page ChatGPT already cites can show up once that page is fetched again; a new mention on a third-party page has to be found first; what the model learned in training changes only with new models. Measure on fixed windows (we use 14 days before and after) instead of checking once.

Does an llms.txt file get me recommended?

Don't count on it. It is cheap to add, but the major AI companies haven't said their assistants use it to choose what to recommend. Crawler access, the pages that get cited and clear comparison pages matter more.

Sources

Where every number comes from.

Our own numbers come from Kliqo’s tracking of one product, with the definitions used. The product stays anonymous. Questions about the data: contact us.

  1. 1Kliqo tracking: AI answers for one product, Sep 14 – Oct 12, 2026Nightly scans of 47 buyer prompts in 6 topics on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overview. 3,402 completed answers: ChatGPT 1,160, AI Mode 1,115, AI Overview 1,127 (the product's whole history at the time). “Named” = the answer mentions the brand, found by name matching and an AI read of every answer. “Recommended” = the reader marked the brand as a recommended option. Read from Kliqo's database on 2026-10-12.
  2. 2Kliqo tracking: sources cited in the same 3,402 answers“Cited” = the URL is in the answer's own citation list. 2,125 of the 3,402 answers cite at least one source. Counts are answers, not citations: a domain cited twice in one answer counts once.
  3. 3Kliqo Crawl insights: the same product's website, Sep 13 – Oct 12, 2026Cloudflare traffic history up to Oct 8, then Kliqo's Cloudflare Worker on the site. “IP-verified” = the request came from an IP range the AI company publishes, or Cloudflare verified the bot. 5xx = a server error response. Oct 12 is partial (to 13:06 UTC).
  4. 4OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlersOAI-SearchBot is used for search results in ChatGPT; GPTBot collects training data; ChatGPT-User fetches pages for a user's request.
  5. 5Google Search Central: AI features and your websiteAI Overviews and AI Mode are part of Google Search; a page needs to be indexed and eligible for a snippet to be shown as a supporting link.
  6. 6RFC 9309: Robots Exclusion ProtocolSection 2.3.1.4: if robots.txt is unreachable because of a server or network error, the crawler must assume the whole site is disallowed.