The short answer
To get cited by ChatGPT, publish a page that answers the buyer's exact question in its first lines, and make sure OpenAI's search crawler can reach it. That's the pattern in our own data. When ChatGPT named a vendor, the vendor usually had a page that stated the answer in plain words: the contract terms, the ownership terms, the audience it serves.
Here's what we ran, what came back, and what we're doing about it.
What we ran
On October 22, 2026 we put a fixed set of 26 buying questions to ChatGPT: web version, logged out, search on, one new chat per question. Four of the questions name LVL3. The other 22 are questions a buyer asks before they know who we are, like which SEO firms work month to month or how a multi-location company should measure marketing ROI.
We appeared in 0 of the 22 non-brand answers. That's our day-zero score, and we're publishing it because a score you only share when it's good isn't a score.
Who got named instead, and why
Where our record shows why a vendor got picked, the reason was usually a page on the vendor's own site that answered the question as asked.
- Asked for month-to-month SEO firms, ChatGPT picked firms that publish month-to-month pricing pages.
- Asked for alternatives to firms with 12-month contracts, it picked firms whose sites state month-to-month terms.
- Asked which firms let clients own their accounts and data, it picked firms with an explicit ownership page.
- Asked about marketing for a PE-backed home services platform, every one of its five picks had a page addressed to PE-backed roll-ups.
- Asked for a local SEO firm in Phoenix, it went to listings and review counts, not to anyone's site.
Size wasn't the bar
Asked who has published a method for measuring AI visibility, ChatGPT named a short list that included a personal blog and a small independent shop. The bar was a citable page, not a big brand.
That one stings. We've had a published method for measuring AI visibility since August 21, 2026, and it wasn't on the list. A page is necessary. It isn't sufficient. The engine still has to find it and pick it, and on that question it didn't.
What to do, in order
- Let the crawler in. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Blocking can also happen by accident: in the LVL3 Home Services Growth Index (464 sites crawled October 20, 2026), under 3% blocked AI crawlers on purpose, but up to 8% had servers that turned them away.
- Write the answer page. Take the five questions your buyers ask before they call, and give each one a page that answers it in the first two sentences. State the terms in one plain sentence. A sentence with the actual terms can be quoted. "Flexible engagement models" can't.
- Fix how you're described. ChatGPT found us on three of our four brand questions, and all three answers used a company name we retired. It reads your old pages and profiles as readily as your new ones, so clean up every place that describes you.
- Get listed where local answers come from. For "best firm in my city" questions, the answer drew on listings and review counts. We're not in those listings, and we weren't in that answer.
- Measure it on a schedule. Same questions, same settings, same day each month. One run tells you almost nothing. The trend tells you whether the work is landing.
Where this leaves us
Zero of 22 is the baseline. We run the same 26 questions on the first Monday of every month, starting November 2, 2026, and we'll publish each score whether it moves or not. The pages that answer the month-to-month and ownership questions are the first fixes, because those are the answers ChatGPT gave to firms that simply wrote it down.
The same discipline works on Google. True Food Kitchen's share of non-brand searches where it ranks top ten on a Google AI overview went from 5.9% to 19.4% between February 15 and August 13, 2026 (GA4, Search Console and Semrush). The work was location pages written to be quoted and listings that agree with each other.
Sources
- LVL3 AI citation run, day zero: 26 questions, ChatGPT web, logged out, search on, October 22, 2026.
- OpenAI, "Overview of OpenAI Crawlers," developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots, accessed October 22, 2026.
- The LVL3 Home Services Growth Index 2026: 464 operator websites crawled October 20, 2026. AI crawler blocking is an upper bound.
- True Food Kitchen case study: GA4, Search Console and Semrush, February 15 to August 13, 2026, published with the client's written approval.