People ask this in a way that assumes a form exists somewhere. Search it and you find the same question phrased four ways: how to list my business on ChatGPT, how to register my business on ChatGPT, how to put my business on ChatGPT, how to get ChatGPT to recommend my company. All four assume there is a place to sign up.
The short answer
There is no directory. You cannot register, submit or list your business with ChatGPT, and nobody can do it on your behalf. Anyone selling you that is selling nothing.
What exists instead is two separate routes, and they get mixed up constantly. You can pay to appear, which is new as of this year. Or you can be recommended for free, which is decided almost entirely by things that are not on your website.
The paid route, which is new
OpenAI now sells advertising inside ChatGPT. Their own pitch is to reach people “as they explore options, compare choices, and make decisions in ChatGPT”. The setup reads like every other ad platform: create a campaign with a budget and a goal, add your ad details, then measure and adjust inside an Ads Manager.
The early advertisers named on their site are Newegg, Best Buy, Lowe’s and VistaPrint. That tells you two useful things at once. It is real, and right now it is being sold to companies considerably larger than yours.
What their page does not say matters just as much. There is no published minimum spend, no pricing, no detail on which countries can buy, and no clear picture of what an ad looks like inside a conversation. If someone quotes you confident numbers on ChatGPT ads today, ask them where those numbers came from.
Paying to appear and being recommended are different products. The ad is labelled. The recommendation is trusted.
Should you buy them?
For most businesses reading this, not yet, and the reason is not the price. A paid placement inside a conversation is only worth buying once you know what happens after it. Someone sees your ad, then looks you up. If the model has nothing to say about you and your website answers none of the questions the ad just raised, you are paying to reach a dead end faster.
The order that works is the same as it has always been in advertising. Be findable and credible first. Then pay to be found sooner.
The free route, which is the one that matters
When somebody asks an AI assistant for the best option in your category, the answer is assembled from what it can find and cross-check about businesses like yours. Almost none of that comes from your own website.
Your Brand is the name that comes up most often. Recent reviews rate them highly, a couple of industry threads recommend them by name, and their listings agree on the same services and contact details. Worth a call if you want a quote.
- Being mentioned somewhere that isn’t yours. Reviews, directories, forums, comparison articles, local press. A model treats your website as a claim and treats everybody else as evidence.
- Being consistent everywhere. Same name, same city, same services, same contact details. Disagreement between sources makes a model less certain, and less certain means less likely to say your name out loud.
- Being specific about what you do and where you do it. Vague positioning is invisible to a system that has to answer a precise question.
- Reddit and LinkedIn in particular. Ask this question in public and the people tracking it keep landing on the same answer: community mentions carry unusual weight in AI answers.
What does not work
- Training ChatGPT on your business. You cannot train it. Pasting your details into a chat changes that one conversation and nothing beyond it.
- An llms.txt file. Google states plainly that you don’t need to create “new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown” to appear in its AI features, and there is no evidence any major model uses one to decide citations.
- Filling your own website with your own name. Models weigh outside sources precisely because your own page is the one source guaranteed to be biased.
Where to start
Before spending anything here, go and ask. It takes ten minutes, costs nothing, and the answer is usually uncomfortable: how to check what AI says about your business.
If the models name your competitors and never you, that is not a mystery. It is the evidence gap above, and this is what actually decides it.
Details of advertising inside ChatGPT are taken from OpenAI’s own advertising site as published in September 2026. Ad products change quickly, so check the source before budgeting against it.