Is your brand recommended by ChatGPT? A 10-point checklist

In short

• Before an AI assistant can recommend you, it has to be allowed to read your site, be able to tell which company you are, and find content worth quoting.
• Most of the checks below take minutes: crawler rules in robots.txt, consistent company facts, and a clear Business Profile.
• The rest is content: plain answers to real customer questions, in English and Traditional Chinese, backed by evidence.

Why a checklist, and how to use it

When a customer asks ChatGPT "which agency in Hong Kong should I use for…", the answer names a few businesses and leaves everyone else out. There is no form to fill in to be included. What you can control is whether the AI tools can reach your pages, whether they can understand them, and whether your content gives them a reason to mention you.

We use the ten checks below when we start an AI-visibility review. Work through them in order: checks 1 to 4 are about access, 5 to 7 about identity, and 8 to 10 about content. If you are new to the topic, our guide to what GEO is explains the background.

Access: can AI tools read your site?

1. Ask the questions yourself. Start with a baseline. List ten to twenty questions your customers really ask, then ask them in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, in English and in Chinese. Record whether you are named, how you are described, and which websites are cited instead. This list becomes your monthly test.

2. Allow OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and recommends allowing it in robots.txt. OpenAI notes it can take about 24 hours for its systems to adjust after you change robots.txt. GPTBot is a separate crawler used for model training, so you can decide on it separately.

3. Allow PerplexityBot. Perplexity uses PerplexityBot to surface websites in its search results and states that it is not used to train AI foundation models. Check that neither your robots.txt nor your hosting firewall or CDN blocks it.

4. Be indexed and snippet-eligible in Google. Google's rule for AI Overviews and AI Mode is simple: a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet in normal Search. There is no extra AI requirement. Check Search Console for your key pages, and make sure no nosnippet or noindex tags were left on them by mistake.

Identity: can AI tools tell who you are?

5. Use one business name everywhere. Google's Business Profile guidelines ask that your name reflect the real-world name used consistently on your storefront, website and stationery. The same habit helps AI tools: if your website says one name, LinkedIn another and a directory a third, the tool may treat them as different companies.

6. Keep address, phone and hours consistent. Google asks for your actual location, a phone number that reaches that business, and your real customer-facing hours. Google also lists checking that your Business Profile information is up to date among its best practices for AI features. Check your website footer, contact page, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and main directories side by side.

7. Add Organization structured data with sameAs. Schema.org's Organization type lets you state your name, URL, logo, address, telephone and founding date in a machine-readable way. Its sameAs property links to pages that unambiguously indicate your identity, such as your LinkedIn page or Wikidata entry. Google advises that structured data must match the visible text on the page, so do not mark up anything you do not show.

Content: do you give AI tools something to quote?

8. Answer the questions customers ask, plainly. Every core service should have a page that says what it is, who it is for, how it works and what happens next, with a short answer first and detail after. Write the English and Chinese versions for their own readers rather than translating line by line; an AI tool can only recommend you in Chinese if it finds good Chinese content about you.

9. Show evidence. The research paper that coined the term GEO found that adding quotations, statistics and citations to credible sources raised a page's visibility in AI answers by 30–40%, while keyword stuffing did little. Use specific facts, named examples you are allowed to share, and links to reliable sources. Our own portfolio is an example of showing work instead of describing it: see our portfolio.

10. Re-test every month and act on the gaps. Run the same questions from check 1 each month. If a competitor is named instead of you, look at the pages the AI tool cites: they usually show what kind of content the tool found useful. Fix one gap at a time and note the date, so you can see what changed.

What to do next

Score yourself honestly. Checks 2 to 7 are mostly a one-off clean-up that your web team can finish in a few days. Checks 8 to 10 are ongoing work, and they are where brands are separated in AI answers over time.

If you would like a second opinion, our AI marketing and GEO service starts with exactly this review, or you can contact us to ask for an AI-visibility check of your brand.

The short version

ChatGPT and the other AI assistants cannot recommend a business they cannot read, cannot identify or cannot quote. Open the door to their crawlers, make your company facts agree everywhere, and publish clear, evidenced answers in both languages. Then check every month what the AI tools say, and keep improving the pages that matter most.