How to get your SaaS recommended by ChatGPT

How does ChatGPT decide which products to mention?

When ChatGPT answers a question about current tools, it can use its search feature, which retrieves web pages and then writes an answer with sources. OpenAI's ChatGPT search help page describes the feature; its crawler documentation lists OAI-SearchBot for search results, GPTBot for training data and ChatGPT-User for user-triggered visits. Those are three different switches in robots.txt. Many industry write-ups report that Bing's index is an important source for ChatGPT search, but OpenAI does not frame it as a single dependency, so treat Bing coverage as a cheap precaution, not a promise.

The model also has what it learned in training. That knowledge is old by definition, which is why a product launched this year mostly gets recommended through the search layer. Your job is to be easy to retrieve and easy to summarise.

Step 1: make sure the right crawlers are allowed

Open your robots.txt and look for blanket Disallow rules or rules aimed at AI bots. If you want to appear in ChatGPT search results, OAI-SearchBot must be allowed. Whether you allow GPTBot (training) is a separate decision about your content, and blocking it does not remove you from search. Do the same check for PerplexityBot and Google-Extended if you care about those products; each vendor documents its own user agents.

• Fetch yourdomain.com/robots.txt signed out and read it.
• Confirm your key pages return 200 and real HTML without requiring JavaScript. Many crawlers do not run scripts.
• Make sure the homepage, pricing and one "what is X" page are not behind a login or a cookie wall.

Step 2: get indexed in Bing

Create a Bing Webmaster Tools account, verify your domain, submit your sitemap and use URL submission for new pages. IndexNow lets a site notify participating search engines, including Bing, when a URL changes; it is a low-effort addition if your platform supports it. Do the same in Google Search Console, since Google's own index also feeds AI features in Search.

Step 3: publish one plain description and an llms.txt

Write one page that answers "what is [product]?" in its first sentence: category, audience, the one thing it does, and the pricing model. Reuse the exact sentence everywhere. Then add an llms.txt file at your root listing your key pages with one line each. The llms.txt proposal is a convention, not a standard that any major vendor has committed to reading, so it is a cheap addition and not a ranking factor. LinkPing's llms.txt tool generates and checks one.

Step 4: get listed where answers come from

A model asked for "best tools for X" usually leans on comparison articles, review sites and directories because those are structured, repeated and indexed. Independent mentions are the strongest signal you can create yourself. In the LinkPing library the relevant groups for a SaaS are SaaS review sites (31), startup directories (18) and launch platforms (52), 101 in total, and AI tool directories (183) if you sell an AI product. Browse them at SaaS directories and AI tool directories.

Prefer listings that are free, human-reviewed and in your exact category over a long tail. Of the 223 directories where we know the price, 165 (74%) are free, so cost is rarely the constraint; relevance is. Our longer look at how many are worth the effort is in Is directory submission still worth it in 2026?.

Step 5: keep the description consistent

Models reconcile conflicting descriptions by guessing. Pick the category label your buyers use, a one-sentence definition and a short list of facts (founded year, pricing model, integrations), then paste them into every listing, your homepage, your docs and your social profiles. When you change positioning, update the listings, not only the website; stale third-party pages are what get quoted back.

How do you check whether it worked?

1. Write 10 prompts a buyer would type, such as "best [category] tools for [audience]" and "alternatives to [competitor]".
2. Run each in ChatGPT with search on, Perplexity and Gemini, signed out where possible, and record whether you are named and which sources are cited.
3. Repeat monthly with the same prompts and keep dated results. One run is an anecdote; a series is a trend.
4. Look at which cited pages are directories or review sites you have not listed on, and fix that gap first.

A spreadsheet is enough for this. What LinkPing adds is the listing side: a submission row per directory and a daily check that confirms each listing is live and links to you, so the gap list in the last step is always current. It does not run AI prompts for you today.

What not to do

• Do not pay for guaranteed AI placement. No vendor can promise it.
• Do not mass-list on irrelevant directories with keyword anchors. That pattern is what Google's link spam policy targets.
• Do not cloak. Serving AI crawlers different content from users violates search policies and erodes trust.
• Do not invent reviews or statistics. If a number is not yours, cite it; if it is yours, date it.