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August 30, 2026 I asked ChatGPT to recommend my own business. It said it had never heard of us.

A few weeks ago I tested something on my own company (Alrebro — we scan websites

and fix what's broken). I asked ChatGPT to recommend us for what we do.

It said it wasn't familiar with us. Even though we rank fine on Google.

That led me down a real rabbit hole into why ranking on Google and getting

recommended by AI are becoming two different things — and what actually seems

to move the needle (spoiler: it's less about tricks, more about your business

info being consistent everywhere).

Wrote up the full story here if anyone's curious:

https://alrebro.com/blog/how-to-get-your-business-recommended-by-chatgpt

Curious if anyone else here has tried this on their own product/business —

what did you find?

6 Comments

  1. 1
    ChatGPT not knowing the name is a lagging indicator, not the problem. Models repeat names that already show up in rooms where people with the problem talk. If nobody who scans sites for a living has ever said Alrebro to another human, the recommend test will keep failing no matter how clean the Google rank is. A better next check than re-prompting the model: find five people who already do this work — an agency owner, a freelancer thread, a private Slack — and see whether the name comes out of their mouth without you in the room. The gap closes after other people have a reason to say it, not after another crawl.
  2. 1
    I ran the same test on SocialPost.ai and got the same answer. The pattern I found is that the models rarely cite your own site, they cite other people writing about you: listicles, Reddit threads, comparison posts, review directories. Your pages are what Google ranks, someone else's page is what an LLM repeats, which makes this closer to a PR and placement problem than an SEO one, and one solid best-tools roundup can outrun months of on-page work.
  3. 1
    It’s fascinating how traditional search indexing and LLM training weights prioritize completely different signals. Since AI relies heavily on entity recognition across varied datasets rather than just organic SEO authority, your point about data consistency makes total sense from an NLP and text analysis perspective. Have you experimented with adding specific schema markups to your site to see if that helps these models parse your business context faster?
  4. 1
    The gap between ranking on Google and being recommended by AI is interesting. Curious whether the bigger issue turned out to be visibility itself, or whether the AI simply lacked enough consistent information to confidently recommend you.
    1. 1

      Good question, and worth being precise about — in our case it was specifically

      the second one: not a lack of visibility exactly, but a lack of *confident,

      consistent* information for the AI to work with.

      The business genuinely existed on Google's radar and ranked fine. The problem

      was that different sources (Google Business Profile vs. the website) gave

      slightly different service-area info, and the AI seemed to just play it safe

      and not mention the business rather than guess which version was right.

      So less "invisible," more "the AI didn't trust what it could see well enough

      to say the name out loud."

      1. 1
        That’s useful context. Happy to continue the conversation privately — what’s the best email to reach you on?
August 30, 2026 Made a complete AI crawler cheat sheet — turns out most "block AI" advice is backwards

While digging into why some client sites weren't showing up in ChatGPT/Perplexity

answers, I kept running into the same confusion: people either block every AI

bot out of general unease, or leave everything wide open without knowing what

each one actually does.

Turns out there are really only 3 kinds of AI crawlers:

1. Training crawlers (collect data for future models) — blocking these is a

privacy choice, doesn't affect visibility today

2. Search/retrieval crawlers (the ones that actually feed live AI answers) —

block these and you're just invisible, full stop

3. User-triggered fetchers (fire when someone in a chat asks the AI to check

your page right now)

The mix-up between #1 and #2 is apparently the most common reason a business

quietly disappears from AI answers with zero explanation.

Put together a full reference list (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot,

Google-Extended, and a bunch of lesser-known ones) with a block-or-allow call

for each, plus a ready-to-copy robots.txt template:

https://alrebro.com/blog/ai-crawlers-list

Curious if anyone here has checked their own robots.txt for this recently —

I was honestly surprised how often this gets set wrong by accident (old

plugin, template default, etc.) rather than on purpose.

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Alrebro scans websites for free and shows exactly what's broken — technical SEO, on-page content, AI search readiness, and local trust signals. No blurred report, no signup wall. If something's worth fixing