Why isn't my company showing up in ChatGPT recommendations?
A diagnostic checklist built from what can actually be measured.
If ChatGPT never recommends your company, the cause is usually one of a few measurable things: the question you care about produces answers that list tools, and you are not on the pages those answers draw from; models cannot tell what your company is from your own site; or the crawlers that feed ChatGPT's search cannot reach your pages. Doclight is an AI visibility tracker, and this checklist follows what it measures.
Work through the steps in order. Each one rules out a cause before you spend time on the next.
1. Are you missing, or only uncited?
Check two numbers separately: how often answers mention you (your name or domain appears) and how often they cite you (they link to your site or name it as a source). A brand can be named without a link. If you are mentioned but rarely cited, models know you exist and the problem is which pages they draw on. If you are never mentioned, start with step 5.
What AI visibility actually measures explains the difference in detail.
2. What kind of answer does the question produce?
Questions like "What are the best tools for X?" or "What are the alternatives to Y?" produce answers built from comparison pages and "best tools" lists. Look at which source domains those answers cite. If they are third-party lists you do not appear on, your own site is not the main lever for that question; getting onto those pages is.
3. Who is named instead of you, and from which page?
For each question where you are missing, record which competitors are named and which URLs the answer cites. A competitor that appears from its own comparison page is a different problem from one that appears through a review site. Investigating questions where competitors appear and you do not walks through this.
4. Can ChatGPT's search crawler reach you?
Check your robots.txt rules for OAI-SearchBot, the user agent OpenAI documents for surfacing sites in ChatGPT search. Blocking GPTBot is a separate choice about model training and does not by itself keep you out of search answers. Also check that your important pages return a 200 status and are not behind redirects or bot protection. See what robots.txt can and cannot tell you.
5. Does your homepage say what you are in the first sentence?
If a model cannot classify your company, it cannot recommend you for a category. Read the first sentence of your homepage, your page title and your meta description. Each should say what the product is, what it does and who it is for, using the same category name everywhere.
6. Is the result stable?
One answer is not a trend. Answers vary between runs, so check how many successful answers a number rests on, and how many calls failed or never completed. "Not mentioned in 0 of 2 answers" and "not mentioned in 0 of 60 answers" are different findings. Incomplete coverage vs. low visibility covers how to tell them apart.
7. Is it the same in every market?
Answers can differ by language and country. If you sell in several markets, run the same questions in each language and keep the results separate.
8. Did a change help?
After you change something, run the same questions again over a window of the same length and compare like with like. A single good answer the day after a change proves nothing; a shift across several runs is evidence.
How Doclight helps
Doclight runs your questions on a schedule across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, records mentions and citations separately for you and the competitors you track, shows which source domains each answer cites, and reports every number with its denominator. Its website crawl flags robots.txt rules that block AI answer crawlers.
What it cannot do: guarantee a recommendation. Models decide what to surface. A tracker shows you the gap and whether a change closed it.
Sources and verification
Crawler behavior is described from each operator's own documentation as recorded in the Doclight codebase on 2026-10-21. Product behavior described here was checked against the same codebase on that date.
Related: how to track whether ChatGPT mentions your brand and citation rate vs. citation share.