Myth vs reality
Appear in ChatGPT as a local business: seven myths
A plumber, a dentist and a candle shop all ask the same thing. Each gets sold a different miracle. Here is what survives a second look.
The seven claims
| Claim | Reality | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Buy 50 links and ChatGPT will name you | No one has shown links alone cause a mention. Cited pages often do have links, which is a weaker thing | Unproven |
| You must pay OpenAI to be listed | ChatGPT search shows web sources; OpenAI documents a crawler called OAI-SearchBot for it | False |
| Blocking GPTBot hides you from answers | GPTBot is for training data. OAI-SearchBot is the one tied to search results | Mixed up |
| An llms.txt file gets you cited | It is a proposal, not a standard any major tool has committed to read | Unproven |
| Reviews and mentions elsewhere help | Assistants often repeat what other sites say about a business, so this is plausible | Plausible |
| Schema markup is the key | Helps parsers read a page. No evidence it changes citations by itself | Unproven |
| A page that answers the question plainly beats one that does not | Cited pages tend to state the answer clearly; this costs nothing to try | Plausible |
Why the myths survive
AI answers change from one run to the next. Sell someone a package, wait two weeks, and some mention will have appeared by luck.
That is how a coincidence becomes a testimonial. Be wary of any case study that shows one screenshot of one prompt on one day.
Real signals are duller. ChatGPT search launched on 31 October 2024, Google began showing AI Overviews in the US from 14 May 2024, and both lean on ordinary web indexes. A site that search engines cannot find is unlikely to be cited by something built on top of them.
Your monthly log cures this. Five runs of one prompt over five days show how much wobble to expect before you blame any tactic. Spread the runs across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, since they disagree with each other. Do it anyway.
Our position
Fix the page first, count the links second
If your site is slow to load, thin on text or missing your address, no link will save it. Once the basics hold, a link count comparison tells you whether you are far behind rivals or level with them.
- Do the free rival link comparison before buying anything
- Judge any agency by whether it explains its method
- Re-test on the same prompts each month
Three cheap tests you can run this week
Name test
Ask each tool about your business by exact name. If it invents a phone number, your own pages are probably unclear.
Category test
Ask for the best option in your town without naming anyone. Record the domains and look them up.
Crawler test
Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for lines that block OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Googlebot.
More questions in the same vein
Is there a way to make ChatGPT recommend my shop?
Not by command. You can make it easy to be found: a crawlable site, a page that states what you sell and where, and mentions on other sites. Whether a given answer includes you stays outside your control.
Does ChatGPT check the web page I link in its settings?
Custom instructions are text you write; they do not make the tool crawl a URL on every prompt. Whether it opens a page depends on the mode and on whether web search is on for that chat.
Should I worry that AI will send my customers elsewhere?
Worry in proportion. Google still sends the bulk of search traffic for most small sites. Track your Search Console clicks for a few months before changing strategy.
