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How AI assistants choose which businesses to recommend

What is known about how ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and other assistants find and choose businesses to mention: search indexes, crawlers, listings, reviews and consistency, and what is still unknown.

ERIC PIWOWAR — MANAGING DIRECTOR2 MIN READLINKEDIN ↗
The short answer

When an assistant searches the web to answer, it relies on search indexes and its own crawlers, then summarizes the sources it finds. Businesses that appear in those sources, are described consistently and have clear pages answering the question are more likely to be named. No assistant publishes its ranking rules, so treat any guaranteed method with suspicion.

What is known

  • Assistants search the web for current questions. Recommendations for local providers usually come from live search results, not only from training data.
  • They use crawlers. OpenAI documents separate crawlers for search (OAI-SearchBot) and for model training (GPTBot), and lets sites control each in robots.txt.
  • They summarize sources. The businesses named tend to be the ones the retrieved pages, listings and reviews mention.
  • Ads don't buy answers. OpenAI states ads do not influence ChatGPT's responses.

What is not known

No assistant publishes how it weighs sources, reviews or brand signals, and the systems change often. Anyone promising guaranteed placement in AI answers is guessing. The durable approach is the one that has always worked in search: be the clearest, most consistently described option, with real evidence behind you.

What to do with that

Follow the five fixes in how to get recommended by ChatGPT, check crawler access with our checklist, and if you want guaranteed placement beside the answer, that is what ChatGPT ads are for.

What is known, and what isn't
Assistants search the web and summarize what they find. How they weigh those sources is not published, so treat any guaranteed method with suspicion.

Sources

  1. Overview of OpenAI crawlers · OpenAI
  2. Ad policies · OpenAI, Sep 10, 2026

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