Why doesn’t ChatGPT mention my business? What you can check, and what you can’t

Why doesn’t ChatGPT mention my business, when it happily names the shop down the road? Part of the answer lives on your own site. That part takes an afternoon to check. The rest is decided by OpenAI.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes, our SEO and AI search fixes begin with a free written site check.

Is OpenAI’s crawler turned away at the door?

ChatGPT search reads the web through a crawler named OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI’s own page is blunt about opting out: those sites stay out of its search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links.

Start with yoursite.com/robots.txt. A line that blocks OAI-SearchBot by name ends the story there. So does a catch-all group that disallows the whole site. The two lines that shut it out look like this:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Can a robots.txt that says yes still mean no?

Yes. Robots.txt is a polite notice, and your server has the final word. Security plugins, host firewalls and CDN bot filters all sit in front of WordPress and can return a 403 to a crawler the notice welcomed.

The way to know is to ask for a page with OpenAI’s crawler string and read the status code. We walk through that command, plus Bing and IndexNow, in three checks for being found by AI search tools.

What did our own site return?

We ran it again on Monday 26 October 2026 at 5:26 PM ET. Our robots.txt and our SEO service page both came back 200. The robots.txt Yoast writes for us is a single catch-all group with nothing disallowed.

That proves the door is open from our machine. It can’t show a rule that checks OpenAI’s IP addresses, so your host’s logs are the better witness.

Reading those logs and clearing the rule that blocks OpenAI’s crawler is one of our SEO and AI search fixes, $45 for one problem.

What can you check and date yourself?

Two things leave a record you can come back to. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt, save a copy and write the day on it. If no group names OAI-SearchBot and nothing disallows the whole site, the notice is fine.

Then note the status code your server gave OpenAI’s crawler string, and the time you asked. A 200 today and a 403 after next month’s plugin update is a change you can point to.

Give a fix a day before you judge it. OpenAI’s crawler page, which we re-read on Monday 26 October 2026 at 6:57 PM ET, says its systems need roughly a day to adjust after a robots.txt update.

Does your site say plainly what you do?

A crawler that gets in still has to work out who you serve. A home page that only says “solutions for every need” gives it nothing to quote.

One page per service, with the service, the place and the price in plain words, is the page a buyer’s question can land on.

Can you check what ChatGPT says about you?

You can ask it, and it’s worth doing. Use your own browser, type the question a buyer would, and note the date, the town you asked from and every business it names. An automated browser can be stopped at a security check before it reaches the chat box, as ours was on 26 October, so this one needs a person.

Treat the answer as one sample. OpenAI’s guide for developers using its web search tool has a setting for the asker’s approximate city, region and time zone. Its stated purpose is “to refine search results based on geography.” The pages on the web change from week to week too.

So a screenshot from your phone in your town says little about what a buyer two towns over sees next Tuesday. Ask the same question on three different days and keep the notes side by side.

Why doesn’t ChatGPT mention my business when the door is open?

Because being named is the one part you don’t control. Opening the door and writing a clear page are the parts you own. Which shops an answer lists is OpenAI’s call, and anyone who guarantees a mention is guessing.

What does it cost to clear a blocked crawler?

On a WordPress or WooCommerce site, it’s $45 for one problem, $110 for up to three and $250 for up to five. If your crawler check came back with anything but 200, send us your site address and the code you saw.