Online users commonly find recommendations for products, businesses, and services by scouring multiple sources, including review platforms, comparison sites, and – of course – the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
In the SERPs of the world’s popular search engine, Google, we’re well accustomed to seeing both ‘Sponsored Results’ and ‘Sponsored Products’ sections at the top of the page, depending on the type of search query.
In short, these advertisements are displayed here because businesses bid on and pay Google for these visible slots.
Now, with AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools like ChatGPT on the rise, many businesses are wondering the same thing: whether the conversational chatbot platform will work in a similar way, allowing businesses to essentially buy ChatGPT recommendations.
Contents:
- Can businesses pay ChatGPT to recommend them?
- Why do businesses want to pay for ChatGPT recommendations?
- How does ChatGPT form its answers?
- How does ChatGPT choose the businesses or websites that it recommends?
- How can you get ChatGPT to recommend your business online?
- Can schema help ChatGPT recommend my products?
- How can Aqueous’ AI SEO services help?
Can businesses pay ChatGPT to recommend them?
No. Currently, there’s no option for businesses to pay OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, for recommendations within their chatbot’s answers.
Instead, ChatGPT relies heavily on organic data to determine which sources it uses in its generative responses. To do this, it scours trusted external sources including websites, reviews, directories, and forum discussions.
Why do businesses want to pay for ChatGPT recommendations?
According to TechCrunch, an online newspaper reporting on breaking tech news, ChatGPT currently receives around 2.5 billion prompts each day – that’s more than double the number reported by the company’s CEO in December 2025.
Every single prompt – whether the user is asking a more general query or for the most efficient air conditioner or highly rated gardener in their local area – is an opportunity for organisations to increase their online visibility.
Subsequently, businesses are looking for ways to increase the likelihood of their products, services, or even informational content appearing for relevant search queries.
How does ChatGPT form its answers?
Query interpretation
ChatGPT interprets the user’s prompt and breaks it down into hundreds of relevant, optimised search queries that it rapidly fires off.
Information retrieval
The chatbot receives answers from the hundreds of optimised search queries, reviews the links, and scrapes relevant content from multiple sources.
Answer synthesis
Using information from these multiple sources, it creates a direct answer to the user’s conversational query complete with convenient, clickable citation links.
It’s these clickable citation links that can be so valuable to businesses, directly driving ChatGPT users to specific websites and their service or product pages.
How does ChatGPT choose the businesses or websites that it recommends?
So, how does ChatGPT decide which brands to recommend during the information retrieval and answer synthesis stages of forming a response to a conversational query?
Primarily, ChatGPT relies on strong trust signals to determine which websites or businesses it recommends in its answers.
These include:
Trusted third-party mentions
Rather than relying on self-claims from individual websites to determine their credibility, ChatGPT defers to trusted external sources. This usually includes high-traffic forums, review platforms, and social media sites.
Crucially, the AI technology is so advanced now that mere mentions of the brand or website across these external sources can be picked up and taken into consideration, rather than requiring a direct hyperlink.
Credible award wins
As part of the tool’s selection process, it can also identify whether the website or business has achieved any credible award wins – especially if the win has earned them a mention in the local (or even national!) newspaper or a link from other relevant digital platforms.
Award wins aren’t usually unsupported self-proclamations: it’s common for them to be accompanied by plenty of third-party verification, further highlighting the trustworthiness of the award-winning business or site.
Positive customer reviews
Of course, ChatGPT is unlikely to recommend users visit websites and businesses that have a high number of poor customer reviews.
High-traffic review platforms, such as Feefo, Trustpilot, and Google Reviews, are usually the first port of call for AI tools like ChatGPT.
These platforms are considered reliable sources of information about genuine customer experiences using a particular business or website, making them a goldmine of trustworthy data for many AI tools, including ChatGPT.
It delves deep into the keywords of each review, pulling out pertinent information to the query, such as the length of time it took a plumber to come out, how fast the delivery of a hair dryer was, and how helpful customer service was when something went wrong.
Training data
Alongside being able to pull information about websites and businesses from live internet searches, ChatGPT has also been trained on a vast amount of historical data.
This training data includes everything from books and articles to websites and code, and is guided by human trainers to ensure it receives appropriate feedback.
ChatGPT therefore heavily relies on this massive bank of data to recognise patterns in human language and create a pool of knowledge that it can refer to for facts.
Newer models are trained on updated datasets, helping to ensure ChatGPT’s databank of core information on websites and businesses remains as up to date as possible.
How can you get ChatGPT to recommend your business online?
If you can’t buy visibility within ChatGPT’s recommendations, how can your business increase its chances of being mentioned by this chatbot?
As part of our AI SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) services, we suggest reshaping your digital marketing strategy around credibility and clarity.
This includes using:
Digital PR (Public Relations)
When it comes to identifying credible sites, one of the key trust factors AI tools tend to look for is the number of high-quality links (or backlinks) a website has.
These links are simply hyperlinks from one website or domain to another. The more topically relevant and reputable the website link is, the more credible AI tools are likely to view your site as.
For example, if The Telegraph wrote an article about digital marketing agencies based on an Aqueous press release and either mentioned or included a direct link to the Aqueous Digital website, that would be a highly valuable link earned through digital PR.
It’s this type of link – not paid backlinks or mass links to disreputable sites – that are most likely to get the trust of AI tools, increasing the chances of your business being mentioned in relevant query responses.
SEO
Another metric that AI tools like ChatGPT often use as credibility indicators is the amount of traffic a site receives.
Once a site reaches a high threshold of popularity and authority, ChatGPT is likely to view it as well-established.
As a result, these tools commonly rely on the content of high-traffic domains they view as credible, such as official government sites and major news outlets.
Using a combination of high-quality content, technical fixes, and on-page changes, Search Engine Optimisation is considered one of the most effective ways to drive organic traffic online.
And while we can’t promise to deliver the same kind of traffic as well-established and highly trusted domains like Gov.uk, we can help to move the needle in a clear and meaningful way for your business.
Clear structuring
Another way that SEO can help your business to be recommended by ChatGPT and other AI chatbots is by creating content that’s easier for the tools to understand and cite.
Because as clever as artificial intelligence undoubtedly is, it’s still just a machine.
Ensuring your website has a clear, machine-readable structure is therefore one of the easiest ways to increase your chances of being cited in ChatGPT recommendations.
This covers on-page changes like implementing hierarchical headings, utilising clear data formats (like tables, graphs, and lists) and ensuring the page has a clear response to the primary topic or question.
But it also includes off-page optimisation.
Namely, implementing the relevant structured data (such as schema markup) as this helps both search engines and ChatGPT to identify the page type and extract relevant information.
There are many different types of schemas, including FAQ, article, and organisation markup. Adding the right ones to your website can reduce ambiguity and ensure ChatGPT has easy access to clear and accurate data about your website or business.
Consistent branding
Having a consistent brand identity can further support your visibility in ChatGPT’s answers by helping to reduce ambiguity and establish your business as a stable, trustworthy entity.
Consistent messaging across various touchpoints, such as social media, blog content, and even responses to customer reviews on independent review platforms, can reinforce your credibility.
Plus, keeping your brand name, tagline, and logo the same across LinkedIn, Instagram, your main website, and any other social platforms and business profiles you use helps to remove confusion.
Regular activity
When ChatGPT makes a live web search to answer a user query, one of the things it considers is whether your website or business has been active recently.
Publishing new content, utilising recent statistics and case studies, and updating older pieces demonstrates that your information is current and accurate, helping to establish your business as a trusted authority in the eyes of ChatGPT.
Can schema help ChatGPT recommend my products?
Implementing the relevant schema markup doesn’t directly ensure ChatGPT will recommend your products or services. However, it does help AI tools to be able to access and understand content on your website.
The machine-readable JSON code supports the accurate indexing, retrieval, and citation of your data, which ultimately helps to prevent misinterpretation and makes finding the relevant information faster.
In short, schema markup is just one small change you can make to help increase the likelihood of your business or website being mentioned in the chatbot’s responses.
How can Aqueous’ AI SEO services help?
Still unsure how to get ChatGPT to recommend your business or appear in wider AI search results? Please don’t hesitate to speak to the highly experienced team of digital marketing experts at Aqueous.
We offer an AI SEO service that helps businesses across the UK to stay ahead of the AI curve with carefully crafted strategies designed to enhance visibility in generative AI responses.
To find out more about how AI search is evolving, get help with separating AI fact from fiction, or request a no-obligation website audit, we’d love to hear from you!
You can either:
- Reach out online
- Call 0800 285 1424,
- Or, email hello@aqueous-digital.co.uk
