FLPL
Dibyendu MondalShort answer
When ChatGPT searches the web, it recommends products it can find, clearly understand and back up with other sources: your own pages, comparison sites, reviews and articles that mention you. If those signals are thin or missing, it names your competitors instead.
Two ways ChatGPT answers
When a buyer asks "what's the best payroll software for a 20-person startup?", ChatGPT answers in one of two ways.
- From what it already learned. The model was trained on a large slice of the public web. Companies that were written about often and consistently before training are more likely to come up from memory.
- From a live search. For questions about products, prices and "best X for Y", ChatGPT often searches the web, reads a handful of pages and writes an answer with links. This part you can influence this month, not next year.
In both cases the model is doing the same basic thing: looking for companies that clearly match the question and that several sources agree on.
What makes a product easy to recommend
1. It can find you
ChatGPT's search uses OpenAI's crawler, OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI's documentation says sites that block it won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Check your robots.txt, your CDN and any bot-protection settings. A surprising number of SaaS sites block AI crawlers by accident.
2. It can tell who you're for
"The all-in-one platform for modern teams" gives a model nothing to match. "Payroll and benefits for US startups with 5 to 50 employees" does. The clearer your pages say who the product is for, the easier it is to match you to a buyer's question.
3. Other sources back you up
Answers lean heavily on pages other than yours: comparison articles, review sites, "best tools for" lists, community threads and directories. If your competitor appears in ten of those and you appear in one, the competitor gets named.
4. The facts are easy to quote
Public pricing, a clear feature list, integrations, and who it's for, all written in plain text. Facts hidden in a PDF, an image or behind a "contact sales" form are hard for any AI tool to use with confidence.
What doesn't work
- Stuffing pages with "ChatGPT" or "AI" keywords.
- Paying for a single directory listing and expecting answers to change.
- Asking ChatGPT about your brand over and over. Your own chats don't train the public answers.
What to do this month
- Write down the 10 to 20 questions your buyers actually ask, in their words.
- Ask them in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and note who gets named.
- For each question where you're missing, check two things: do you have a page that answers it directly, and do the sources the AI cited mention you?
- Fix the pages first, then work on the outside sources.
Step 2 is exactly what the free FLPL check does for you, across 20 questions and three AI tools.
Questions people also ask
Can I pay ChatGPT to recommend my software?
No. You can't buy a place in ChatGPT's answers. What you can do is make your product easy to find, understand and confirm across the web.
Does asking ChatGPT about my company help?
No. Your own conversations don't change the answers other people get.
How long until ChatGPT starts mentioning us?
For answers that come from live search, changes can show up within weeks of your pages and outside mentions improving. Answers from the model's built-in knowledge change only when new models are trained.