How to Get ChatGPT to Recommend Your Business

Ask ChatGPT for the best soy candles in South Africa and you get two or three names, not ten blue links. Everyone else isn't in the answer at all. To get named, an assistant has to be able to read your store, find an answer to the question on it, and see other people saying the same thing about you. On Shopify the first part is mostly done for you, if nobody has broken it. The other two are where the work is.

1. Can it read you? The assistant's crawler has to get in, and the words have to be in the page when it arrives.
2. Do you answer the question? Somewhere on your site, in plain words, is the thing the shopper asked.
3. Does anyone else agree? Reviews, press, lists, forums. The assistant trusts what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself.

Every assistant reads a different index

Most stores do their SEO for Google and assume the rest follows. It doesn't, because the assistants don't all search the same place.

Bing Webmaster Tools can import a site straight from Google Search Console, so it takes about five minutes. Most stores never do it. Brave is one field and no account, and we submit every page we publish on our own site.

Ranking on Google covers one of the four.

We checked whether AI crawlers can get into a Shopify store

We took a live store we run, a South African candle and body care brand on a standard Shopify setup, and requested its homepage as each of the four main AI crawlers.

All four got the full page, 282,877 bytes each, the same as a normal browser. Shopify's default robots.txt has no rules for AI crawlers, so they're allowed in.

The default is fine. What breaks it is someone changing it. Watch for three things:

• A custom robots.txt.liquid. Someone added it years ago to block a spammy bot and copied a list off a forum that also blocks GPTBot.
• An SEO or "bot protection" app that adds its own rules. Check what it wrote.
• Your own Cloudflare account in front of the domain. Since July 2025, Cloudflare blocks known AI crawlers by default on new domains. Most Shopify stores don't proxy through their own Cloudflare. If yours does, check its AI crawler setting.

The bot reads your raw HTML, not your page

This is the one that catches Shopify stores out. Vercel and MERJ tracked over 500 million GPTBot requests and found no sign of it running JavaScript. ClaudeBot downloads JavaScript files but doesn't run them either. The bot reads whatever text is in the HTML when the server sends it, and nothing that loads afterwards.

On our test store, the product tabs (description, fragrance notes) were all in the raw HTML. Good. The Product schema had the name, description, image, price and brand, but no review rating. Whatever stars a shopper sees, the bot gets no rating from the schema. If your review app can write its rating into the theme's Product schema, switch that on.

You can test your own store in about a minute. Paste this into Terminal on a Mac:

# Swap in your best-selling product URL
URL="https://yourstore.com/products/your-best-seller"

# 1. Does each AI crawler get a 200?
for BOT in GPTBot OAI-SearchBot ClaudeBot PerplexityBot; do
  curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}  $BOT\n" -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; $BOT)" "$URL"
done

# 2. Is the text the bot needs actually in the HTML?
#    Swap in a phrase from one of your reviews, then one from your FAQ.
#    0 means the bot can't see it.
curl -s -A "GPTBot" "$URL" | grep -c "smells like a summer holiday"

Shopify already built the shopping part

Shopify has its own route into the assistants, and you don't install anything. Shopify Catalog lists eligible products by default and passes them to AI platforms. Agentic Storefronts, which lets shoppers buy inside ChatGPT and Copilot, switches itself on for eligible merchants.

There's a catch for us. Right now, selling through ChatGPT and Copilot needs you to sell to US buyers. A South African store that only ships locally isn't in that yet. When it opens up, the product data in your Shopify admin is what gets sent: titles, descriptions, product types, variants, metafields. A product titled "Candle 3" with a one-line description won't get recommended for anything. Fix the data now and you're ready when the rollout reaches you.

Write pages an assistant can quote

Assistants pull short, clear answers. A page that opens with the answer and backs it up gets quoted. A page that opens with three paragraphs about your brand story doesn't.

• Find the real questions. Your support inbox, your reviews, and the "People also ask" box on Google. Write them in the customer's words, not yours.
• Answer first. One or two sentences that answer the question, then the detail. On a product page that's the FAQ. On a collection page it's the intro.
• Use tables for comparisons. Burn time, size, scent strength, price per ml. Assistants lift tables almost as-is.
• Keep FAQs in metafields and render them in Liquid, so they're in the HTML the bot reads, not in an app that loads later.
• Write one sentence that says what you sell, where, and for who. Use the exact same sentence on your homepage, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Instagram bio and About page. The assistant sees one consistent answer everywhere it looks.

Get other people saying it

The third question is the slow one. Assistants weigh what the web says about you: reviews on more than one platform, mentions in press and gift guides, real answers on Reddit and in Facebook groups. None of it is new. It's PR and reputation work, and it now feeds the answer box as well as Google.

Spread your review requests. If every review lives inside one app on your own site, that's one source. Send some customers to Google, and use a review app whose ratings also show in Google Shopping.

The tricks we won't use

"AI SEO" is having its 2012 moment, and plenty of the advice going around is just the old spam with a new name:

• Writing your own "top 10 best" list, ranking yourself first, and paying a site to publish it.
• Bots that post on Reddit and Quora pretending to be happy customers.
• Rewriting 30% of every page every 90 days so it looks fresh.
• Publishing hundreds of AI-written articles a month.

Some of it works for a few months. Then it hits Google's published spam policies on link schemes and scaled content abuse, and Reddit's ban on bot accounts. When it unwinds, you lose Google rankings too, and Google's index is what Gemini and AI Overviews read. That's a risk we won't put on a client's store for a few months of being named.

If the only reason an assistant names you is that you faked the consensus, it stops naming you when the fake gets caught.

Your 15-minute check

1. Ask the assistants (5 min). Put three questions a buyer would ask into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini. "Best [product] in [country]", "where can I buy [product]", "is [your brand] any good". Write down who gets named.
2. Run the Terminal check above (2 min) on your homepage and your best seller.
3. Open yourstore.com/robots.txt (1 min) and search for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and OAI-SearchBot. You don't want to see any of them next to a Disallow.
4. Add the store to Bing Webmaster Tools (5 min) by importing from Search Console, then submit /sitemap.xml.
5. Submit your homepage to Brave (1 min) at search.brave.com/submit-url.
6. Write your one sentence (1 min) and put it in the five places listed above this week.

Then ask the same three questions again in 60 days and compare the names. Want us to run the full version on your store? Talk to us.

Sources

• The rise of the AI crawler, Vercel and MERJ
• Overview of OpenAI crawlers, OpenAI
• Anthropic appears to be using Brave to power web search for Claude, TechCrunch
• Content Independence Day: no AI crawl without compensation, Cloudflare
• Agentic commerce on Shopify: how it works, Shopify
• Spam policies for Google web search, Google