Why ChatGPT Never Recommends Your Business

Being trained on and being recommended are different decisions

OpenAI runs three crawlers and they do separate jobs. GPTBot collects material that may be used to train models. OAI-SearchBot indexes pages so they can be cited when somebody asks a question. ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a person asks ChatGPT to go and look at it.

Blocking the first is a legitimate choice. Plenty of businesses do not want their words used as training material and that is their call to make. Blocking the second is something else entirely: it does not protect anything, it removes you from the answer.

Over the last two years a great many "block AI scrapers" plugins and platform toggles have shipped with all three blocked together, switched on by owners who believed they were protecting their content. They were not opting out of training. They were opting out of existing.

How to check in two minutes, without any tools

Type your domain into a browser followed by /robots.txt. Every website has one and it is public.

Look for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Applebot or Bingbot followed by Disallow: /. Also look for a User-agent: * followed by Disallow: /, which blocks everything that has not been named separately, including all of the above.

If none of those appear, nothing is stopping you being recommended and the reason lies elsewhere. If they do, you have found it, and it is a two-line fix in a file you already control.

We found exactly this on a site we built ourselves. The Line Check flagged that ShotBot was blocking ClaudeBot, on a robots file nobody had deliberately written that line into. It is easy to do and almost impossible to notice.

Why this is worth more attention than it gets

Search has not stopped mattering, but a growing share of the questions that used to start in a search box now start in a conversation. "Who does padel court hire near Chippenham." "Recommend a physiotherapist in Wiltshire." Those answers name a handful of businesses and the list is short.

Ranking tenth on Google still puts you on the page. Being absent from an assistant answer puts you nowhere, because there is no page two.

Bing matters here for the same reason and gets ignored for the wrong one. Its search share looks small until you notice it feeds Copilot, Windows search and a meaningful slice of what assistants return. A Bing Places listing is free and takes fifteen minutes, and almost none of your competitors have bothered.

Apple is the one nearly everybody forgets. Ask an iPhone for a gym nearby and the answer comes from Apple Maps, not Google. Apple Business Connect is free. If you are not on it you are invisible to more than half the phones in the country.

What to do about it, in order

Read your robots file and unblock OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Applebot and Bingbot. Leave GPTBot and Google-Extended blocked if you would rather not be training material. Those are separate lines and separate decisions.

Then give the assistants something worth quoting. They cite pages that answer a question directly: prices, opening hours, what you do and where, service areas named as places rather than implied. A page of real questions with real answers is worth more to an assistant than a homepage of adjectives.

Then claim the listings the assistants read: Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect. Free, dull, and almost nobody in Chippenham, Calne, Corsham, Melksham or Devizes has done all three.

None of that requires a new website. If you do all of it and still cannot be found, the problem is further up the line, and that is a different conversation.

How we check it

We built the Line Check because we kept auditing sites by hand and kept finding the same things: booking systems nobody could reach on a phone, enquiry forms that went nowhere, and robots files quietly shutting out the crawlers that decide who gets named.

It reads your site the way a browser builds it rather than the way a server sends it, takes Google’s own speed and accessibility measurements over its own reading, attributes every byte your homepage loads to whoever sent it, and tells you which crawlers your own robots file is turning away. It is free and it takes under a minute.

We build booking systems, websites and the software behind them for businesses in Chippenham and across Wiltshire. If the report shows you nothing you did not already know, you do not need us and we would rather you found that out for free.